diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore
index 0ed16fc576..62a562e80c 100644
--- a/.gitignore
+++ b/.gitignore
@@ -10,3 +10,5 @@ heat-test.db
 .venv
 AUTHORS
 ChangeLog
+templates/cloudformation-examples
+
diff --git a/tools/fetch-cloudformation-examples b/tools/fetch-cloudformation-examples
new file mode 100755
index 0000000000..4650dd2aca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tools/fetch-cloudformation-examples
@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env python
+
+import httplib
+import os
+import sys
+import shutil
+import xml.etree.ElementTree as xml
+
+basepath = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(sys.argv[0],
+    os.path.pardir,
+    os.path.pardir,
+    'templates',
+    'cloudformation-examples'))
+
+bucket = 'cloudformation-templates-us-east-1'
+
+def main():
+    conn = httplib.HTTPConnection('s3.amazonaws.com')
+    conn.request('GET', '/%s/' % bucket)
+    resp = conn.getresponse()
+
+    tree = xml.parse(resp)
+    rootElement = tree.getroot()
+
+    if os.path.exists(basepath):
+        print 'Deleting %s' % basepath
+        shutil.rmtree(basepath)
+
+    os.makedirs(basepath)
+    print 'Creating %s' % basepath
+
+    for entry in rootElement.iter('{http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/}Key'):
+        key = entry.text
+        if key.endswith('.html'):
+            continue
+        filename = os.path.join(basepath, key)
+
+        print 'Writing to %s' % filename
+        conn.request('GET', '/%s/%s' % (bucket, key))
+        resp = conn.getresponse()
+        contents = resp.read()
+
+        f = open(filename, 'w')
+        f.write(contents)
+        f.close()
+
+if __name__ == '__main__':
+    main()