Quickstart

Getting started with Boto 3 is easy, but requires a few steps.

Installation

Install the latest Boto 3 release via pip:

pip install boto3

You may also install a specific version:

pip install boto3==1.0.0

Note

The latest development version can always be found on GitHub.

Configuration

Before you can begin using Boto 3, you should set up authentication credentials. Credentials for your AWS account can be found in the IAM Console. You can create or use an existing user. Go to manage access keys and generate a new set of keys.

If you have the AWS CLI installed, then you can use it to configure your credentials file:

aws configure

Alternatively, you can create the credential file yourself. By default, its location is at ~/.aws/credentials:

[default]
aws_access_key_id = YOUR_ACCESS_KEY
aws_secret_access_key = YOUR_SECRET_KEY

You may also want to set a default region. This can be done in the configuration file. By default, its location is at ~/.aws/config:

[default]
region=us-east-1

Alternatively, you can pass a region_name when creating clients and resources.

This sets up credentials for the default profile as well as a default region to use when creating connections. See Credentials for in-depth configuration sources and options.

Using Boto 3

To use Boto 3, you must first import it and tell it what service you are going to use:

import boto3

# Let's use Amazon S3
s3 = boto3.resource('s3')

Now that you have an s3 resource, you can make requests and process responses from the service. The following uses the buckets collection to print out all bucket names:

# Print out bucket names
for bucket in s3.buckets.all():
    print(bucket.name)

It's also easy to upload and download binary data. For example, the following uploads a new file to S3. It assumes that the bucket my-bucket already exists:

# Upload a new file
data = open('test.jpg', 'rb')
s3.Bucket('my-bucket').put_object(Key='test.jpg', Body=data)

Resources and Collections will be covered in more detail in the following sections, so don't worry if you do not completely understand the examples.