Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a low-cost & high-availability storage service provided by Amazon Web Services. It's really popular, more so due to the recent switching of IT infrastructures to cloud-based solutions. You can know more about Amazon S3, it's pricing structure etc. at http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ In this article we'll be looking at access/uploading files from/to the Amazon S3 service using Python. Welcome Boto Boto is a Python package which provides interfaces to various Amazon Web Services, one of them being S3. Let's start with installation of Boto package. If you are running Debian-based systems, here the easy way: Code: sudo apt-get install python-boto If you need to install from source, that's also not very tough as Boto does not have any dependencies other than what already comes with Python. Run the following commands as root. Code: git clone https://github.com/boto/boto.git cd boto python setup.py install Accessing S3 with Boto Boto provides a very simple and intuitive interface to Amazon S3, even a novice Python programmer and easily get himself acquainted with Boto for using Amazon S3. The following demo code will guide you through the operations in S3, like uploading files, fetching files, setting file ACLs/permissions, etc. Code: #!/usr/bin/python ## import the module from boto.s3.connection import S3Connection ## create connection to the service conn = S3Connection('<your_aws_access_key>', '<your_aws_secret_key>') ## creating a bucket bucket = conn.create_bucket('go4expert_python') ## uploading data from boto.s3.key import Key ## set target bucket key_obj = Key(bucket) ## set filename key_obj.key = 'my_file_1' ## set the permission/ACL of the file key_obj.set_acl('public-read') ## set the data for the file key_obj.set_contents_from_string('Go4expert rocks') ## set data from an existing file key_obj.set_contents_from_filename('g4e.txt') ## downloading data from boto.s3.key import Key key_obj = Key(bucket) key_obj.key = 'my_file_1' contents = key_obj.get_contents_as_string() ## Download data into a file key_obj.get_contents_to_filename('g4e-downloaded.txt') ## deleting a file key_deleted = bucket.delete_key('my_file_1') ## list files/keys in a bucket rs_keys = bucket.get_all_keys() ## now, let's look at some miscellaneous operations ## get a list of all the buckets available ## returns ResultSet object rs_buckets = conn.get_all_buckets() for bucket_obj in rs_buckets: print bucket_obj.name Well, that was working on Amazon S3 with Python in a nutshell. Hopefully this will help you.
