LocalEmu, a free, open-source AWS emulator: run 132 AWS services locally with one pip install

submitted by nullroute to programming 74 points | 14 comments https://localemu.cloud/

I maintain LocalEmu, a free and open-source (Apache 2.0) AWS emulator. It started as a fork of the archived LocalStack Community edition. The goal is to keep a genuinely free, open local AWS emulator alive and maintained.

What it does:

• Emulates 132 AWS services on a single endpoint (localhost:4566)
• Pure-Python core, with real Docker engines for Lambda, EC2, RDS, ECS, EKS, and OpenSearch
• Point your existing AWS CLI, boto3, Terraform, CDK, or Pulumi at it, zero config
• No account, no auth token, no telemetry. Persistent state across restarts
• Optional fidelity knobs: IAM policy enforcement, throttling, latency injection, Lambda cold starts

Why I built it: kill the multi-minute deploy loop, drop the dev/test AWS bill to zero, and stop keeping real credentials on dev machines.

It’s for fast local dev, testing, and learning, not production, and not bit-for-bit parity with the real cloud.

Repo: github.com/localemu/localemu Site: localemu.cloud

Happy to answer questions, and feedback is very welcome.