A session manages state about a particular configuration. By default, a session is created for you when needed. However, it's possible and recommended that in some scenarios you maintain your own session. Sessions typically store the following:
- Credentials
- AWS Region
- Other configurations related to your profile
Boto3 acts as a proxy to the default session. This is created automatically when you create a low-level client or resource client:
import boto3 # Using the default session sqs = boto3.client('sqs') s3 = boto3.resource('s3')
You can also manage your own session and create low-level clients or resource clients from it:
import boto3 import boto3.session # Create your own session my_session = boto3.session.Session() # Now we can create low-level clients or resource clients from our custom session sqs = my_session.client('sqs') s3 = my_session.resource('s3')
You can configure each session with specific credentials, AWS Region information, or profiles. The most common configurations you might use are:
aws_access_key_id
- A specific AWS access key ID.aws_secret_access_key
- A specific AWS secret access key.region_name
- The AWS Region where you want to create new connections.profile_name
- The profile to use when creating your session.
Note
Only set the profile_name
parameter when a specific profile is required for your session. To use the default profile, don’t set the profile_name
parameter at all. If the profile_name
parameter isn't set and there is no default profile, an empty config dictionary will be used.
For a detailed list of per-session configurations, see the Session core reference.
Similar to Resource
objects, Session
objects are not thread safe
and should not be shared across threads and processes. It's recommended
to create a new Session
object for each thread or process:
import boto3 import boto3.session import threading class MyTask(threading.Thread): def run(self): # Here we create a new session per thread session = boto3.session.Session() # Next, we create a resource client using our thread's session object s3 = session.resource('s3') # Put your thread-safe code here
Note
Note that boto3.client uses a single, shared session for all calls. This can lead to concurrency issues unexpectedly when done across parallelization primitives. We recommend managing your own session(s) with concurrent code.