LocalStack

While it is preferrable to develop and test applications against actual cloud resources when possible, not all readers may have AWS access or be able to set up a private account. Additionally, there is always the risk of leaving cloud resources provisioned, which may result in unintended charges. To make these tutorials as accessible and cost-effective as possible, examples in these tutorials leverage the free-tier version of LocalStack whenever possible.

LocalStack is able to emulate an AWS cloud environment on the user’s development machine, making it useful for both development and testing. Examples that work and function with the free-tier version of LocalStack will be appropriately marked.

Dependencies

LocalStack requires the following be installed on the user’s local machine to function properly.

• Python & PIP
• Docker Desktop

Navigate to the Python and Docker Desktop installation page for platform-specific setup instruction.

LocalStack CLI

LocalStack offers a CLI for provisioning an AWS test environment. To install it, execute the following.

pip3 install localstack

Initialize Localstack with the following:

localstack start

AWS Local Client

AWS CLI

Adding the --endpoint-url option to the AWS CLI will direct API requests to the Localstack instance. For example, the following will create an AWS S3 data storage bucket within Localstack.

aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566 s3 mb s3://mytestbucket