Set up the AWS CLI on Windows

Theoretically you can install the AWS CLI¹ to import JSON files to DynamoDB.

Once you install this, you’ll want to add it to your path.

To connect, do this:

aws configure

To fill out the prompts, you’ll need to create a username/password.². Then find the region name³.

To use DynamoDB, create a table, then create a policy with rights to add/select from the table⁴.

The policy will look like this:

{
 "Version": "2012-10-17",
 "Statement": [
  {
   "Effect": "Allow",
   "Action": [
    "dynamodb:BatchGetItem",
    "dynamodb:BatchWriteItem",
    "dynamodb:DeleteItem",
    "dynamodb:GetItem",
    "dynamodb:PutItem",
    "dynamodb:Query",
    "dynamodb:UpdateItem"
   ],
   "Resource": [
    "arn:aws:dynamodb:us-east-1:472846177579:table/talks"
   ],
   "Condition": {
    "ForAllValues:StringEquals": {
     "dynamodb:LeadingKeys": [
      "${www.amazon.com:user_id}"
     ]
    }
   }
  }
 ]
}

You can save this in the policy editor⁵, attach policy to the user you made earlier ⁶. Alternately, there is a permission called AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess that you can add.

Then, this will work:

aws dynamodb list-tables

Theoretically this should work:

aws dynamodb batch-write-item --request-items file://1.json

However, the AWS tool seems to suffer from the disastrous Python unicode problems:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 3747-3748: ordinal not in range(128)

I went through a few dozen blog posts / Github tickets, and nothing solved it.

Rather, I found that once you get this far, it’s worth just writing Python scripts to upload data:

from __future__ import print_function
import boto3
import json
import decimal

# endpoint_url="http://localhost:8000"
dynamodb = boto3.resource('dynamodb', region_name='us-east-1')

table = dynamodb.Table('talks')

with open("d:\\projects\\image-annotation\\data\\talks\\json\\1\\1.json") as json_file:
  row = json.load(json_file, parse_float = decimal.Decimal)
  table.put_item(
    Item={
      'id_i': str(row['id_i'])
    }
  )

1. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html#install-msi-on-windows [↩]
2. https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home#users [↩]
3. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/rande.html [↩]
4. https://console.aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/home?region=us-east-1#tables:selected=talks [↩]
5. https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?#policies [↩]
6. https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?#users/gary [↩]