How to Install Boto3 on PyCharm?

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Boto3 allows you to create, configure, and manage AWS services such as EC2 and S3 using an SDK with an object-oriented API. There’s also an SDK for Python.

Problem Formulation: Given a PyCharm project. How to install the Boto3 library in your project within a virtual environment or globally?

Here’s a solution that always works:

  • Open File > Settings > Project from the PyCharm menu.
  • Select your current project.
  • Click the Python Interpreter tab within your project tab.
  • Click the small + symbol to add a new library to the project.
  • Now type in the library to be installed, in your example "boto3" without quotes, and click Install Package.
  • Wait for the installation to terminate and close all popup windows.

Here’s the installation process as a short animated video—it works analogously for the Boto3 library, just type in “boto3” in the search field instead:

Make sure to select only “boto3” because there are many other packages that are not required but also contain the same term (false positives):

PyCharm boto3 package

Alternatively, you can run the pip install boto3 command in your PyCharm “Terminal” view:

$ pip install boto3

The following figure shows how to use pip to install the Boto3 package:

"pip install boto3" PyCharm check version

You can check your installation using the following two lines of Python code that print out the version of the package:

import boto3
print(boto3.__version__)

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