boto

boto 2.6.0 19-Sep-2012

Introduction

Boto is a Python package that provides interfaces to Amazon Web Services. At the moment, boto supports:

Compute
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR)
- AutoScaling
- Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Content Delivery
- Amazon CloudFront
Database
- Amazon Relational Data Service (RDS)
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon SimpleDB
Deployment and Management
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Amazon CloudWatch
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- AWS CloudFormation
Application Services
- Amazon CloudSearch
- Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF)
- Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- Amazon Simple Notification Server (SNS)
- Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
Networking
- Amazon Route53
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Payments and Billing
- Amazon Flexible Payment Service (FPS)
Storage
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
- Amazon Glacier
- Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
- Google Cloud Storage
Workforce
- Amazon Mechanical Turk
Other
- Marketplace Web Services

The goal of boto is to support the full breadth and depth of Amazon Web Services. In addition, boto provides support for other public services such as Google Storage in addition to private cloud systems like Eucalyptus, OpenStack and Open Nebula.

Boto is developed mainly using Python 2.6.6 and Python 2.7.1 on Mac OSX and Ubuntu Maverick. It is known to work on other Linux distributions and on Windows. Boto requires no additional libraries or packages other than those that are distributed with Python. Efforts are made to keep boto compatible with Python 2.5.x but no guarantees are made.

Installation

Install via pip:

$ pip install boto

Install from source:

$ git clone git://github.com/boto/boto.git
$ cd boto
$ python setup.py install

ChangeLogs

To see what has changed over time in boto, you can check out the release notes in the wiki.

Special Note for Python 3.x Users

If you are interested in trying out boto with Python 3.x, check out the neo branch. This is under active development and the goal is a version of boto that works in Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.x. Not everything is working just yet but many things are and it's worth a look if you are an active Python 3.x user.

Finding Out More About Boto

The main source code repository for boto can be found on github.com. The boto project uses the gitflow model for branching.

Online documentation is also available. The online documentation includes full API documentation as well as Getting Started Guides for many of the boto modules.

Boto releases can be found on the Python Cheese Shop.

Join our IRC channel #boto on FreeNode. Webchat IRC channel: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=boto

Join the boto-users Google Group.

Getting Started with Boto

Your credentials can be passed into the methods that create connections. Alternatively, boto will check for the existance of the following environment variables to ascertain your credentials:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID - Your AWS Access Key ID

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - Your AWS Secret Access Key

Credentials and other boto-related settings can also be stored in a boto config file. See this for details.