Meet LocalEmu, the free successor to LocalStack

An open-source AWS emulator for your laptop. No account, no token.

For years, one tool sat quietly at the center of how I work with AWS.

It let me build and test cloud applications on my own laptop, with no AWS account, no credentials, and no bill at the end of the month. I could create an S3 bucket, invoke a Lambda function, stand up a DynamoDB table, point Terraform at it, break everything, reset, and try again in seconds. It made AWS feel safe to experiment with. It saved me countless hours, and more than a few surprise charges.

That tool was the open-source Community edition of LocalStack.

What changed

In December 2025, LocalStack published a post called “The Road Ahead.” It explained that the way they delivered their AWS emulator was going to change. The free Community edition would be wound down, and the product would move to a single distribution that requires authentication.

On March 23, 2026, the open-source GitHub repository was archived. It became read-only. The free Community edition is no longer actively maintained, and the current LocalStack distribution requires an account and an auth token to run. For a lot of people, continuous integration pipelines that had been pulling the public image for years broke overnight.

I want to be fair here. LocalStack is a remarkable piece of engineering, built by a talented team over many years. Running a project that emulates the surface area of AWS is genuinely hard, and a company has every right to choose its own direction and to build a sustainable business. I am grateful for everything they created.

But I also could not ignore a simple fact: the free, no-sign-up tool I reached for almost every day no longer had anyone carrying it forward.

The decision

The Community edition was open source under the Apache 2.0 license. That license exists precisely for moments like this. It means the work can live on.

So I decided to give it a new life.

LocalEmu is a fork of the archived LocalStack Community edition. My goal is straightforward: keep a free, open AWS emulator alive and maintained, with no account and no token required, for the developers who want to learn, build, and test locally at zero cost.

Today I am releasing LocalEmu 1.0.0.

What LocalEmu is

LocalEmu emulates 132 AWS services on your machine. You do not learn a new API. You point the AWS CLI, boto3, Terraform, CDK, or Pulumi you already use at a single endpoint, http://localhost:4566, and they work.

pip install "localemu[runtime]"
localemu start

Installation is just that one command. The one prerequisite is Docker: the services that run a real engine (Lambda, EC2, RDS, ECS, EKS, OpenSearch) use it to start their sidecar containers, so Docker needs to be installed and running. Everything else is pure Python and needs no Docker. No Java, no account, no token.

What makes it more than a set of canned responses is that, where it counts, the behavior is real rather than stubbed:

• Lambda runs your code inside the official AWS Lambda runtime images. Your handler executes for real.
• EC2 instances are real containers attached to a real virtual private cloud, with security groups enforced by actual packet filtering, not a lookup table that pretends.
• RDS gives you a real PostgreSQL or MySQL engine you can open a connection to with psql or mysql.
• IAM can evaluate your identity and resource policies using the real AWS policy logic and actually deny a request with 403 AccessDenied.

There is also a built-in dashboard at http://localhost:4566/_localemu/dashboard that shows your resources, a live feed of API calls, and a CloudTrail history, so you can see what your code is doing as it runs.

What LocalEmu is not

LocalEmu is for fast local development, testing, and learning. It is not where you run production, and it will not give you bit-for-bit parity with the real cloud. Its value is the iteration loop: try an idea, see it work or fail, and adjust in seconds, on a plane or in a coffee shop, with no account and no cost. Learn a service before you touch a real bill, and test your logic before you deploy.

Try it

The fastest way in:

pip install "localemu[runtime]"
localemu start

Give the AWS CLI local credentials and a region, then point it at LocalEmu:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1

aws --endpoint-url http://localhost:4566 s3 mb s3://my-bucket
aws --endpoint-url http://localhost:4566 dynamodb list-tables

Prefer Docker? The image is multi-architecture, so it runs natively on Intel and on Apple Silicon:

docker run --rm -p 4566:4566 localemu/localemu

Documentation, a per-service reference, and runnable end-to-end examples are at https://localemu.cloud.

Help it grow

I am one person maintaining this right now, and a project like this lives or dies by its community.

If LocalEmu is useful to you, the most valuable things you can do are simple: try it, and if it helps, star the repository so others can find it. Open an issue when something does not work. Tell me which services or behaviors matter most to you. And if you are able, contribute, whether that is code, documentation, examples, or just a clear bug report.

The source is at https://github.com/localemu/localemu, and runnable examples live at https://github.com/localemu/localemu-examples. It is free, and it is Apache 2.0, and it will stay that way.

To the LocalStack team and every contributor who came before me: thank you. LocalEmu stands on your shoulders, and I will do my best to be a good steward of the work you started.

Now let us keep building locally.

---