Ministack (Replacement for LocalStack)

kerblang 183 points 37 comments March 31, 2026
ministack.org · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (8 comments)

giobox

Ugh, I hadn't heard the news about the LocalStack licensing changes. I had some great results building AWS services for local dev as well as CI/CD and testing in GH actions with LocalStack in previous jobs. I secretly always hoped Amazon would buy out LocalStack and make it the official free local development environment for AWS work, but I guess it probably would reduce revenues spent on AWS based dev and test environments. The compatibility with the AWS CLI was mostly excellent in my experiences.

kay_o

> Copyright (c) 2024 MiniStack Contributors Already lying or totally unreviewed AI slop ?

mikecarlton

Another alternative, earlier on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420619

staticassertion

I really don't see how any clone is going to manage to do what localstack couldn't - maintain compatibility with tons of AWS services while not getting paid for it. If this were viable, why would it not have worked before? The only things I can think of are that perhaps LocalStack was just a mess of a codebase that couldn't maintain velocity or attract contributors, or it just failed to steward new contributors or some such thing.

volume_tech

for most teams the pain was not missing features -- it was drift. you build against the emulator for months, then hit some edge case in prod where the S3 response format differed slightly or DynamoDB error codes were not qui

threethirtytwo

What’s the gcp equivalent

philip1209

I'm frustrated with the Localstack license changes and will evaluate ministack. But, for anybody else who needs a quick fix - you can pin to the `community-archive` tag and it should unblock you quickly: https://hub.docker.com/layers/localstack/localstack/communit...

robshippr

The real issue with LocalStack was always drift. Tests pass locally, then something breaks in staging because the S3 response format is slightly different or DynamoDB throttling doesn't match. After getting burned enough times we just switched to short-lived real AWS environments for integration tests. More expensive, but way fewer surprises in prod.

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