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.

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.

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 .

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)

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

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

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.

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:

• AWS SDKs and Tools Maintenance Policy
• AWS SDKs and Tools Version Support Matrix

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