About LocalEmu
LocalEmu is a free, open-source AWS cloud emulator. You install it with pip, start it with one command, and every AWS service runs on your machine. No account. No token. No sign-up.
What we believe
Cloud development should not require the cloud. When you write code that talks to S3, DynamoDB, SQS, or Lambda, you should be able to test it on your laptop without an AWS account, without internet access, and without paying anything.
When every code change requires a deploy-wait-test cycle against a remote cloud, iteration time grows from seconds to minutes. A local emulator turns that round-trip into a sub-second feedback loop on the developer's own machine, the same way unit tests turn compile-time correctness checks into instant feedback.
A local emulator fixes this. It gives you sub-second feedback, zero cloud cost, and full isolation. No rate limiting, no eventual consistency surprises, no shared environment conflicts. We believe this tool should be free, open, and self-contained. Not free-with-an-asterisk. Not open-source-but-you-need-a-token. Actually free. Actually open. Actually yours.
What LocalEmu is
- • A complete AWS emulator that runs on your machine
- • Pure Python, installed with
pip install localemu[runtime] - • S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, SQS, SNS, ECS, RDS, and 125+ more services
- • Works with the AWS CLI, boto3, Terraform, CDK, Pulumi, and any tool that speaks AWS
- • Ships
awsemu, a built-in CLI wrapper that sets credentials and endpoint automatically - • Built-in persistence. Your state survives restarts. No paid tier required.
- • Apache 2.0 licensed
Persistence is free
In LocalStack, state persistence was a paid feature. Your DynamoDB tables, S3 buckets, and Lambda configurations disappeared every time the container stopped unless you paid for a Pro license. Cloud Pods, which let you save and share state snapshots, required a paid plan and stored your data on LocalStack's servers.
In LocalEmu, persistence is built in and free. Set PERSISTENCE=1 and your local state survives restarts. No account. No token. No external server. Your data stays on your machine, where it belongs.
What LocalEmu will never be
We made decisions early that define this project. These are not up for debate.
No tokens, no authentication
You will never need to create an account, generate a token, or sign in to use LocalEmu. The emulator runs on your machine. It is yours. We do not gate features behind authentication.
No "Pro" tier
There is one version of LocalEmu. It contains everything. We will not split the project into free and paid editions. If a feature exists, it is available to everyone.
No telemetry by default
LocalEmu does not phone home. It does not send analytics, usage data, or error reports to any server. The analytics endpoints in the code are empty by default, so the emitters are no-ops at runtime. Your development environment is private.
Runs locally
When you run localemu start, no DNS is hijacked and nothing is fetched from third-party release servers. The pure-Python services (S3, DynamoDB, SQS, and most others) work with your internet off; the services that run a real engine (Lambda, EC2, RDS, ECS, EKS, OpenSearch) pull their Docker images the first time you use them.
Pure-Python core, no Java
LocalEmu installs with one pip command and needs no Java, no JAR files, and no account. The Lambda init binary (Go) is pre-built and bundled. Docker provides the real engines for the container-backed services (Lambda, EC2, RDS, ECS, EKS, OpenSearch); everything else is pure Python.
Who maintains LocalEmu
LocalEmu is maintained by TocConsulting and open-source contributors. The project is hosted on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.
We welcome contributions, bug reports, and feature requests. If you use LocalEmu and it saves you time, the best way to give back is to report issues, improve documentation, or contribute code. Start with our Contributing guide and Code of Conduct.
Heritage
LocalEmu is a fork of LocalStack, an AWS cloud emulator originally created at Atlassian in 2016 by Waldemar Hummer (Source: GitHub) and publicly released in 2017. Over nine years, LocalStack grew to 64,800 GitHub stars and over 400 million Docker pulls (Source: Docker Hub, GitHub) before the community repository was archived on March 23, 2026 (Source: GitHub).
We are grateful to every contributor who built the foundation that LocalEmu stands on. The emulator framework, the service implementations, the testing infrastructure, the protocol handlers. All of this was built by talented engineers who cared about the developer experience.
The decision to fork was driven by a simple observation: thousands of developers depend on a free, open-source AWS emulator, and that tool should remain free and open-source. Read the full story in From LocalStack to LocalEmu.