Testing AWS Applications Locally with the AWS Emulator: A Practical Setup Guide

Run Lambda, S3, DynamoDB and SQS on your own machine and in GitHub Actions, without touching a real AWS account

By Sandip Das · 2026-11-13 · 12 min read

AWS has released its open-source AWS Emulator as generally available. This beginner-friendly tutorial installs it with Docker, runs Lambda, S3, DynamoDB and SQS locally, and wires it into a GitHub Actions pipeline so integration tests stay fast and cost nothing.

You'll start from an empty folder and finish with a complete local test setup for an AWS application. Along the way you build and start the new AWS Emulator in Docker, point the AWS CLI and boto3 at it, create an S3 bucket, a DynamoDB table and an SQS queue, deploy a small Python Lambda function that connects them, cover the whole flow with a pytest integration test, and then run that same test in GitHub Actions on every push. None of it needs an AWS account, and if you follow the setup, none of it can reach one.

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