Using LocalStack to test AWS services locally

LocalStack

LocalStack provides a local testing environment for applications utilising AWS managed services. It’s language agnostic and features pluggable services, offline access and error injection.

LocalStack can be installed using Python pip:

pip install localstack

Running Services

To start LocalStack, simply use the localstack start command. Starting LocalStack initialises a local version of many AWS services, including; API Gateway, Kinesis, Dynamo DB, Elasticsearch, S3, Firehose, Lambda, SQS, Redshift, CloudWatch and more.

By default LocalStack initialises all available services bound to localhost, although this, and many other properties, are easily configured using environment variables.




There is also an official localstack/localstack Docker image available from the Docker Hub.

We can run LocalStack on docker easily. If already you have docker environment, just hit:

$ docker run -it -p 4567-4578:4567-4578 -p 8080:8080 localstack/localstack

You can see services running on various ports like:




The dashboard is running at http://localhost:8080. We can look created resources on this dashboard.

Also, endpoints of each services are available on localhost. For example, S3 is available at http://localhost:4572. Let’s test awscli!

$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4572 s3 mb s3://test1
make_bucket: test1
$ aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4572 s3 ls
2006-02-04 01:45:09 test1

It worked! 

I highly recommend you to try LocalStack if you are developing applications which works on AWS, or tools or libraries for AWS services.





- by Anshita Gupta

email - anshita.techycardia@gmail.com