Boto3 is the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Software Development Kit (SDK) for Python, which allows Python developers to write software that makes use of services like Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2. You can find the latest, most up to date, documentation at Read the Docs, including a list of services that are supported.

First, install the library and set a default region:

$ pip install boto3

Next, set up credentials (in e.g. ~/.aws/credentials):

[default]
aws_access_key_id = YOUR_KEY
aws_secret_access_key = YOUR_SECRET

Then, set up a default region (in e.g. ~/.aws/config):

[default]
region=us-east-1

Then, from a Python interpreter:

>>> import boto3
>>> s3 = boto3.resource('s3')
>>> for bucket in s3.buckets.all():
        print(bucket.name)

Assuming that you have Python and virtualenv installed, set up your environment and install the required dependencies like this instead of the pip install boto3 defined above:

$ git clone https://github.com/boto/boto3.git
$ cd boto3
$ virtualenv venv
...
$ . venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ pip install -e .

You can run tests in all supported Python versions using tox. By default, it will run all of the unit tests, but you can also specify your own nosetests options. Note that this requires that you have all supported versions of Python installed, otherwise you must pass -e or run the nosetests command directly:

$ tox
$ tox tests/unit/test_session.py
$ tox -e py26,py33 tests/integration

You can also run individual tests with your default Python version:

$ nosetests tests/unit

Sphinx is used for documentation. You can generate HTML locally with the following:

$ pip install -r requirements-docs.txt
$ cd docs
$ make html