Good way to "wrap" the opening and closing of a database around functions in Python?

Question

I've looked at a few related questions on StackOverflow and at some documentation/guides regarding wrappers, all of which tells me "no," but this doesn't seem right. That said, I'm very new to programming, so 🤷‍♂️

Problem: Opening and closing a database (using python/sqlite3) requires a tedious amount of repeated code (as I understand it):

connection = None
connection = sqlite3.connect(path)
conn.execute("bla bla bla")
conn.commit()
conn.close()

So, I tried to write a reusable wrapper for my functions that access the database. But it's not ideal and so far, mostly complicates the code (problems discussed afterwards):

import functools
import sqlite3 
from sqlite3 import Error


conn = None         # a global that I hope to get rid of soon.  

def connect_db(function):
    """
    wrapper that should open db, performs function, then closes db
    """
    global conn
    try:
        conn = sqlite3.connect("journ.db")
        print("connected")
    except:
        print("problem")

    @functools.wraps(function)
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        return function(*args, **kwargs)
        # conn.close()  # unreachable code!!
    return wrapper

@connect_db
def find_entry_info(user_id):
    """
    Queries database regarding users' entries and returns a dictionary (k=entry_url, v=[date, time]).
    """
    entry_info = {}
    # entry_tags = {}
    db_handler = conn.execute("SELECT entry_url, date, time FROM entries WHERE user_id=? ORDER BY date DESC, time DESC",
                        user_id
                            )
    for row in db_handler:
        entry_info[row[0]]=[row[1], row[2]]
    return entry_info

entry_info = find_entry_info(user_id)

The problems that I know of right now:

1. conn is a global variable, the classic "bad idea". I'm confident I can figure this one out eventually, but I'm focused more on the following:
2. there's no way, based on the documentation, to close the db within the wrapper after returning the needed values from the wrapped function. I could close it within the wrapped function, of course, but that defeats the point of the wrapper, and isn't any better than calling a regular function to open the database.

So, is there a clever/simple way to write a wrapper that opens/closes the database? A popular library that I'm missing? Should I try looking at python classes . . . or just accept the clutter surrounding my queries? Thanks to all in advance for your time and kindness.

Answer 1

Connections can be used as context managers which automatically commit transactions or rollback in case of exceptions:

with sqlite3.connect(path) as conn:
    conn.execute(query)

The connection will also automatically be closed at the end.