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aws-sdk-go is the official AWS SDK for the Go programming language.
Checkout our [release notes](https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/releases) for information about the latest bug fixes, updates, and features added to the SDK.
## Installing
If you are using Go 1.5 with the `GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT=1` vendoring flag, or 1.6 and higher you can use the following command to retrieve the SDK. The SDK's non-testing dependencies will be included and are vendored in the `vendor` folder.
Otherwise if your Go environment does not have vendoring support enabled, or you do not want to include the vendored SDK's dependencies you can use the following command to retrieve the SDK and its non-testing dependencies using `go get`.
[`Getting Started Guide`](https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-go/) - This document is a general introduction how to configure and make requests with the SDK. If this is your first time using the SDK, this documentation and the API documentation will help you get started. This document focuses on the syntax and behavior of the SDK. The [Service Developer Guide](https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/) will help you get started using specific AWS services.
[`SDK API Reference Documentation`](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-go/api/) - Use this document to look up all API operation input and output parameters for AWS services supported by the SDK. The API reference also includes documentation of the SDK, and examples how to using the SDK, service client API operations, and API operation require parameters.
[`Service Developer Guide`](https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/) - Use this documentation to learn how to interface with an AWS service. These are great guides both, if you're getting started with a service, or looking for more information on a service. You should not need this document for coding, though in some cases, services may supply helpful samples that you might want to look out for.
[`SDK Examples`](https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/tree/master/example) - Included in the SDK's repo are a several hand crafted examples using the SDK features and AWS services.
## Configuring Credentials
Before using the SDK, ensure that you've configured credentials. The best
way to configure credentials on a development machine is to use the
`~/.aws/credentials` file, which might look like:
```
[default]
aws_access_key_id = AKID1234567890
aws_secret_access_key = MY-SECRET-KEY
```
You can learn more about the credentials file from this
Alternatively, you can set the following environment variables:
```
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=AKID1234567890
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=MY-SECRET-KEY
```
### AWS shared config file (`~/.aws/config`)
The AWS SDK for Go added support the shared config file in release [v1.3.0](https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/releases/tag/v1.3.0). You can opt into enabling support for the shared config by setting the environment variable `AWS_SDK_LOAD_CONFIG` to a truthy value. See the [Session](https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go/wiki/sessions) wiki for more information about this feature.
## Using the Go SDK
To use a service in the SDK, create a service variable by calling the `New()`
function. Once you have a service client, you can call API operations which each
return response data and a possible error.
To list a set of instance IDs from EC2, you could run: