Is there a safe way to upgrade boto3 system wide?

Daniel Quinn

3/10/23, 9:30 PM

(I'm running Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS)

I make daily use of awscli, which I installed with apt and it works just fine. However the version of boto3 that came with it is very old (1.9.253) by comparison to the most recent version (1.20.3). Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but there appears to be a bug in this version of boto3 that prevents me from writing any scripts that need to use AWS's SSO interface:

import boto3                                                                                      
boto3.setup_default_session()                                                                     
client = boto3.client('secretsmanager')                                                           
client.list_secrets()  # NoCredentialsError

Running the same code in a virtualenv running a modern version of boto3 renders the expected output, so I figure it's the wide version gap that's at fault here.

I know that I could just run pip install --upgrade boto3 as root, but that'd likely cause all manner of stuff breaking, so I'm looking for a cleaner/safer alternative. Does one exist? At the moment I'm looking at starting little virtualenvs everywhere and writing wrapper aliases to use that python instance to run my scripts but that feels nasty too.

0 + 0

python

Daniel Quinn

3/12/23, 9:42 AM

It's a standard virtualenv created with `python3 -m venv my_virtualenv`. The only thing *different* is the boto3 version that gets installed into it when I run `pip install boto3`.

Daniel Quinn

3/16/23, 5:28 PM

I'm already running Python 3.8.10 as that's what comes with Ubuntu.

Daniel Quinn

3/19/23, 9:40 AM

It's generally a Bad Idea to run `pip` against the system-installed Python. I can obviously upgrade boto3 in a virtualenv, but I don't want to change the version of the system-installed boto3 directly like that as it would likely have unintented (and hard to fix) repercussions.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Is there a safe way to upgrade boto3 system wide?

TH: มีวิธีที่ปลอดภัยในการอัปเกรดทั้งระบบ boto3 หรือไม่

RO: Există o modalitate sigură de a face upgrade la nivelul întregului sistem boto3?

RU: Есть ли безопасный способ обновить систему boto3 в целом?

VI: Có cách nào an toàn để nâng cấp toàn bộ hệ thống boto3 không?

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