Welcome to LocalStack Docs
LocalStack runs AWS, Snowflake, and Azure APIs in containers on your own machine, so you can build, test, and debug cloud applications without a real cloud account. You use the same SDKs, CLIs, and infrastructure-as-code tools you already work with, then deploy to the real cloud when you are ready.
Choose a product to get started
LocalStack for AWS
Run your AWS services locally to emulate cloud, serverless, and AI applications, without touching your live AWS instance.
Explore the DocsLocalStack for Snowflake
Run your queries and pipelines locally with full control over your data workflows, without touching your live Snowflake instance.
Explore the DocsWhat is LocalStack?
Section titled “What is LocalStack?”LocalStack is a local cloud development platform. It runs the APIs of AWS (over 120 services), Snowflake, and Azure inside containers on your own machine, so you can build and test cloud applications without a real cloud account. You use the same API calls, SDKs, and infrastructure-as-code tools (CDK, Terraform, Pulumi) that you would use against the live cloud. Code that works against LocalStack works the same way once you deploy it.
LocalStack is meant for development and testing, not for running production workloads. When your code is validated locally, you deploy it to real AWS or Snowflake as usual. Because everything runs on your machine, there are no provisioning delays and no cloud bills while you iterate.
Who is LocalStack for?
Section titled “Who is LocalStack for?”LocalStack is built for the people who develop, test, and debug cloud applications, and for the AI agents that now do this work alongside them:
- Developers who want an environment on demand instead of waiting on a shared cloud staging account.
- Test and CI engineers who need isolated, disposable environments that behave the same way on every run.
- Platform and DevOps teams who check Terraform, CDK, and Pulumi before anything reaches production, and who hand out self-service sandboxes through the ephemeral instance API.
- Data engineers who build and test Snowflake queries and pipelines locally.
- AI agents that get their own local sandbox, so they can reproduce and fix cloud bugs without cloud access, added cost, or waiting on provisioning.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Getting started with AWS: install LocalStack and run your first service.
- Local AWS services: the AWS APIs LocalStack emulates and how to use them.
- Developer tools: the CLIs, the MCP server, Cloud Pods, and chaos testing.
- CI pipelines: run LocalStack in CI as a single Docker image.
- Getting started with Snowflake: run Snowflake locally.
- Help and support: where to get help and how to reach the team.
If you are building with an AI agent, start from agents.md for setup steps, or llms.txt for a machine-readable index of these docs.