boto3

Boto is a Python based API to Amazon’s AWS resources. Boto 3 is the most current release (as of Jan 2019). All of the examples on this page use Boto 3.

Installation

You can install Boto (Boto 3 in this example) using pip:

$ pip install boto3

The Basics

Before you can access any AWS resources, you need to setup credentials for Boto to use. Boto can use the credentials that are by default saved in ~/.aws/credentials (when setup using the AWS CLI). It will use the default profile by, well, default.

Then you import Boto into your Python file:

import boto3

Using S3 With Boto

Assuming you have setup the credentials correctly, you can print out a list of all buckets with:

for bucket in s3.buckets.all():
    print(bucket.name)

Note

This will print out the names of all buckets in the region specified by the credentials/config file.

Copying Between Two Buckets

You can use boto3 to copy an object from one S3 location to another using the following code example:

import boto3

client = boto3.client('s3')

src = {
    'Bucket': 'my-src-bucket',
    'Key': 'my-file.txt',
}

# This will copy s3://my-src-bucket/my-file.txt to s3://my-dest-bucket/copy-of-my-file.txt
client.copy(src, 'my-dest-bucket', 'copy-of-my-file.txt')