Dev.to
7/11/2026

The original title is: "LocalEmu: an open-source local AWS emulator for testing 132 services without cloud costs"
Original: Stop Paying AWS Just to Test Your Code Locally
Short summary
LocalEmu is an open-source AWS emulator supporting 132 services that lets developers build and test against AWS APIs entirely on their local machine. It works with existing tools like AWS CLI, boto3, Terraform, CDK, and Pulumi by simply pointing them to localhost. Unlike basic mock emulators, it runs real Lambda runtime images, actual PostgreSQL/MySQL for RDS, and enforces security groups and IAM policies for realistic local testing.
- •LocalEmu supports 132 AWS services for fully local testing without cloud costs
- •Works with existing tools: AWS CLI, boto3, Terraform, CDK, Pulumi — just point to localhost
- •Includes a built-in dashboard for inspecting running services, S3 objects, DynamoDB, and CloudTrail events
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