python 2.7 - Retrieve S3 file as Object instead of downloading to absolute system path

Question

I just started learning and using S3, read the docs. Actually I didn't find anything to fetch the file into an object instead of downloading it from S3? if this could be possible, or I am missing something?

Actually I want to avoid additional IO after downloading the file.

Answer 1

You might be looking for the get_object() method of the boto3 S3 client:

http://boto3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/services/s3.html#S3.Client.get_object

This will get you a response object dictionary with member Body that is a StreamingBody object, which you can use as normal file and call .read() method on it. To get the entire content of the S3 object into memory you would do something like this:

s3_client = boto3.client('s3')
s3_response_object = s3_client.get_object(Bucket=BUCKET_NAME_STRING, Key=FILE_NAME_STRING)
object_content = s3_response_object['Body'].read()