Boto3 - The AWS SDK for Python

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 our doc site, including a list of services that are supported.

Boto3 is maintained and published by Amazon Web Services.

Boto (pronounced boh-toh) was named after the fresh water dolphin native to the Amazon river. The name was chosen by the author of the original Boto library, Mitch Garnaat, as a reference to the company.

Notices

On 2026-04-29, support for Python 3.9 ended for Boto3. This follows the Python Software Foundation end of support for the runtime which occurred on 2025-10-31.

For more information on deprecations, see this blog post.

Getting Started

Assuming that you have a supported version of Python installed, you can first set up your environment with:

$ python -m venv .venv
...
$ . .venv/bin/activate

Then, you can install boto3 from PyPI with:

$ python -m pip install boto3

or install from source with:

$ git clone https://github.com/boto/boto3.git
$ cd boto3
$ python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python -m pip install -e .

Using Boto3

After installing 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

Other credential configuration methods can be found here

Then, from a Python interpreter:

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

Running Tests

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

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

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

$ pytest tests/unit

Getting Help

We use GitHub issues for tracking bugs and feature requests and have limited bandwidth to address them. Please use these community resources for getting help:

Ask a question on Stack Overflow and tag it with boto3
Open a support ticket with AWS Support
If it turns out that you may have found a bug, please open an issue

Contributing

We value feedback and contributions from our community. Whether it’s a bug report, new feature, correction, or additional documentation, we welcome your issues and pull requests. Please read through this CONTRIBUTING document before submitting any issues or pull requests to ensure we have all the necessary information to effectively respond to your contribution.

Maintenance and Support for SDK Major Versions

Boto3 was made generally available on 06/22/2015 and is currently in the full support phase of the availability life cycle.

For information about maintenance and support for SDK major versions and their underlying dependencies, see the following in the AWS SDKs and Tools Shared Configuration and Credentials Reference Guide:

More Resources

Release files for boto3 1.43.99

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for boto3 1.43.99
File	Size	Uploaded
boto3-1.43.99.tar.gz	112.7 kB	Sep 21, 2026	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for boto3 1.43.99
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
boto3-1.43.99-py3-none-any.whl 140.0 kB Sep 21, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 252.7 kB

Release files / boto3-1.43.99.tar.gz

Download URL	boto3-1.43.99.tar.gz
Size	112.7 kB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`328c8640e7b7dbdaebc271e6eea0f7301218872d67d0661a7beda7d3a1799c07`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`99105e0c4c1a87443680194db582888e8e5e0a80e3e1ed224ca8111becf9e5ed`
Upload date	Sep 21, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/5.1.1 CPython/3.10.20`

Release files / boto3-1.43.99-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	boto3-1.43.99-py3-none-any.whl
Size	140.0 kB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`3becba8d7bdf80ea0010c68bc6b0772adb8be344f06bdcea77629002be19beb7`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`6f37d59247c882bc078b73cfa6f6bb247ac51bedc7637f6a8800def385dcfbba`
Upload date	Sep 21, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/5.1.1 CPython/3.10.20`