MiniStack documentation

Reference for the MiniStack local AWS emulator — 55+ 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

46 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

  85 resource types, 15 intrinsics, change sets, and stack lifecycle.

Testcontainers

Spin up MiniStack in JVM or Python tests with a single dependency. 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 ministack[testcontainers] — pytest fixtures, endpoint builders, reuse across tests.

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.