The best AWS emulator & LocalStack alternative

Free. Open source. MIT. Forever. 60+ AWS services. One container. One port. No account, no telemetry, no tiers.

Quickstart · Ecosystem · Why MiniStack · Community

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⚡ Quickstart

pip install ministack && ministack

or:

docker run -p 4566:4566 ministackorg/ministack

Point any AWS SDK / CLI / CDK / Terraform at http://localhost:4566:

aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566 s3 mb s3://hello
aws --endpoint-url=http://localhost:4566 dynamodb list-tables

Done. No login, no cloud account, no credit card.

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🧱 The Ecosystem

Project	What it is	Status
🟢 ministack	The emulator. 60+ AWS services on :4566. Drop-in LocalStack replacement.	Stable
🟢 ministack-mcp	Model Context Protocol server — give Claude/Cursor/Copilot live access to the MiniStack service catalog and AWS parity data.	Stable
🟢 testcontainers-ministack	Testcontainers module. Spin MiniStack inside any JVM/Python/Node test suite.	Stable
🟢 ministack-power	Learn and test AWS with MiniStack inside the Kiro IDE.	Stable
🟠 miniflake	Local Snowflake emulator powered by DuckDB. Same DNA, different cloud.	Preview

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🚀 Why MiniStack

Real AWS parity

Wire shape verified against botocore for every operation we ship — request/response field names, types, error codes, HTTP status codes, headers, SigV4 scopes, ARN formats, eventstream framing. boto3, AWS CLI, CDK, Terraform, openai-python, anthropic-sdk-python — they can't tell us from AWS at the API boundary.

Lean by design

One container. One port. No JVM. No background daemons. Stdlib-only runtime. Heavy data planes (Kafka, Spark, LLMs) plug in by env-var passthrough to your own infra — we don't bundle what you don't need.

Free, forever

MIT. No "pro" tier, no feature gates, no telemetry, no upsell. If it works for you, ⭐ the repo is the only thanks needed.

Built for the real toolchain

✅ Terraform · ✅ AWS CDK · ✅ AWS SAM · ✅ CloudFormation · ✅ Pulumi · ✅ boto3 / AWS SDK for every language · ✅ Testcontainers · ✅ docker-compose · ✅ GitHub Actions · ✅ GitLab CI

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🧰 What's inside

Compute, Storage, Database, Messaging, Networking, Identity, Observability, IaC, AI/ML — 60+ services

Category	Services
Compute	Lambda (warm containers, layers, ESMs, Durable Functions) · ECS · EKS · Batch · EMR
Storage	S3 (versioning · checksums · replication) · EFS · S3 Tables (Iceberg REST)
Database	DynamoDB (transactions · streams) · RDS (Postgres + MySQL backed) · ElastiCache
Messaging	SQS · SNS · Kinesis · EventBridge · Pipes · Firehose
Networking	API Gateway v1/v2 + WebSocket · ALB/ELBv2 · Route53 · ACM · AppSync (GraphQL + Events)
Identity	IAM · STS · Cognito (idp + identity) · Secrets Manager · KMS
Observability	CloudWatch · CloudWatch Logs · CloudTrail
Orchestration	Step Functions · MWAA · Glue · Scheduler
Other	CodeBuild · ECR · CloudFront · WAF v1/v2 · IoT · MediaConnect · Transfer (SFTP) · Inspector2 · ServiceDiscovery · ResourceGroups · SSM · Organizations · Account · CUR · Backup · AutoScaling · APIGW v1 / v2 · CFN
Coming v1.4	🔵 Bedrock (foundation models, Converse, InvokeModel, Agents, Knowledge Bases, Guardrails, Mantle/OpenAI-shape) · 🔵 MSK (Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka) · 🔵 Multi-region

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💬 Community

Built by MiniStackers, for MiniStackers. Welcome ❤️

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Free. Open source. MIT. Forever. Star us on GitHub if MiniStack saves you cloud bills.