Amazon CloudFront distribution_id as a credential with Boto

Question

I'm new to Python and Boto, I've managed to sort out file uploads from my server to S3. But once I've uploaded a new file I want to do an invalidation request.

I've got the code to do that:

import boto

print 'Connecting to CloudFront'
cf = boto.connect_cloudfront()
cf.create_invalidation_request(aws_distribution_id, ['/testkey'])

But I'm getting an error: NameError: name 'aws_distribution_id' is not defined

I guessed that I could add the distribution id to the ~/.boto config, like the aws_secret_access_key etc:

$ cat ~/.boto 
[Credentials]
aws_access_key_id = ACCESS-KEY-ID-GOES-HERE
aws_secret_access_key = ACCESS-KEY-SECRET-GOES-HERE
aws_distribution_id = DISTRIBUTION-ID-GOES-HERE

But that's not actually listed in the docs, so I'm not too surprised it failed: http://docs.pythonboto.org/en/latest/boto_config_tut.html

My problem is I don't want to add the distribution_id to the script as I run it on both my live and staging servers, and I have different S3 and CloudFront set ups for both.

So I need the distribution_id to change per server, which is how I've got the the AWS access keys set.

Can I add something else to the boto config or is there a python user defaults I could add it to?

Answer 1

I solved this by using the ConfigParser. I added the following to the top of my script:

import ConfigParser

# read conf
config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
config.read('~/my-app.cnf')
distribution_id = config.get('aws_cloudfront', 'distribution_id')

And inside the conf file at ~/.my-app.cnf

[aws_cloudfront]
distribution_id = DISTRIBUTION_ID

So on my live server I just need to drop the cnf file into the user's home dir and change the distribution_id

Answer 2

Since you can have multiple cloudfront distributions per account, it wouldn't make sense to configure it in .boto.

You could have another config file specific to your own environment and run your invalidation script using the config file as argument (or have the same file, but with different data depending on your env).