Ansible fails to find boto3 and botocore although installed

Question

The following task:

  - name: Fetch dump file from S3
      aws_s3:
        bucket: mybucket
        object: somedump.sql
        dest: /tmp/somedump.sql
        mode: get
      delegate_to: "{{ ec2_instance_ip }}"

fails with:

fatal: [localhost -> 22.33.111.88]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "msg": "boto3 and botocore required for this module"}

$ ssh [email protected]
$ pip freeze
boto3==1.7.41
botocore==1.10.41

$ pip3 freeze
blinker==1.3
boto3==1.7.41
botocore==1.10.41

The target machine is ubuntu/xenial so I have also taken care of installing python-minimal (given that out of the box the machine only had python3)

Therefore, on the target machine:

$(which python) --version
Python 2.7.12

I have run the above play with and without appending:

  vars:
    ansible_python_interpreter: /usr/bin/python3

at the end of the task...

Answer 1

Could you try to downgrade "boto3" package to see if there is no issue there?

Get available versions:

pip install boto3==some_nonsense_word

Then:

pip uninstall boto3

Finally:

pip install boto3==<VERSION>

---

Answer based on the findings from the following GitHub issue comment:

https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/issues/2014#issuecomment-144620598

Answer 2

I had the same problem on MacOS and downgrading didn't fix the issue. However, adding the following python path to a hosts file fixed the issue:

[local]
localhost              ansible_connection=local     ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/local/bin/python3

Afterwards, you can run your ansible playbook with the hosts as:

ansible-playbook -i ./hosts playbook.yml

---

Or you set the path to python in the execution:

ansible-playbook -i localhost, playbook.yml --extra-vars "ansible_python_interpreter=/Users/admin/temp/ansec2/venv/bin/python" 

---

If you're on Mac and you have installed other copies of python via homebrew, you can run these commands to install boto to the system python:

sudo /usr/bin/python -m easy_install pip
sudo /usr/bin/python -m pip install boto

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Here are more solutions to the issue: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/15019