MiniStack documentation

Reference for the MiniStack local AWS emulator — 60+ services, a CloudFormation engine, and Testcontainers modules for Java and Python.

Start here

• Architecture

  How the ASGI gateway routes requests, registers services, and runs init/ready scripts.

• Configuration

  Every environment variable, admin endpoint, and runtime knob — grouped by subsystem.

• Multi-tenancy

  How accounts, regions, and the AccountScopedDict isolate state per caller.

• Known limitations

  Honest cross-service gap list — what's stored but not dispatched, and by-design diffs.

• Migrating from LocalStack

  Env-var mapping, admin-endpoint compat, Testcontainers swap, and known incompatibilities.

Services

60+ AWS services with per-operation coverage tables, CloudFormation mappings, and limitation callouts.

• All services

  Sortable catalog of every supported service, protocol, and op count.

• CloudFormation engine

  161 resource types, 16 intrinsics, change sets, and stack lifecycle.

Testcontainers

Spin up MiniStack in JVM, Python or .NET tests. The modules handle image pinning, health checks, endpoint wiring, and (optionally) real sidecar databases.

• Java module

  org.ministack:testcontainers-ministack — MiniStackContainer, real-infra mode, private-registry forwarding.

• Python module

  pip install "testcontainers>=4" — ready-to-copy pytest fixtures, endpoint wiring, reuse across tests.

• .NET example

  Testcontainers for .NET, xUnit and the AWS SDK for .NET v4 — a runnable S3, SQS and DynamoDB example.

Infrastructure as code

MiniStack is a drop-in endpoint override for the major IaC tools.

• Terraform, CDK, Pulumi, CloudFormation

  Provider configs and endpoint overrides for every supported tool on one page.

AI agents (MCP)

Give any MCP-capable agent (Claude, Cursor, Continue, Devin, Cline) a full local AWS environment.

• MiniStack MCP server

  uvx ministack-mcp — the agent deploys code, creates infrastructure, runs tests, and reads results against localhost. No AWS account, no signup.