The LocalStack Extension for Docker Desktop enables developers working with LocalStack to run their AWS applications or Lambdas entirely on their local machine without connecting to a remote cloud provider!

LocalStack empowers developers to use over 75+ AWS services locally while helping them simplify their testing and development workflow. LocalStack supports a comprehensive list of APIs, which you can view on our Feature coverage page.

You can install the LocalStack Extension for Docker Desktop via pulling our public Docker image from Docker Hub:

docker extension install localstack/localstack-docker-desktop:0.5.1

To setup the Docker Extension by building the image locally, you can run the following commands:

make install-extension

It will build the Docker image and install the extension on your Docker Desktop application. After the installation, you will be prompted to select where LocalStack will be mounted. Open the drop-down and choose the username. You can additionally change this setting by navigating to the Configurations tab and selecting the mount point.

Currently, the LocalStack Extension for Docker Desktop supports the following features:

• Control LocalStack: Start, stop, and restart LocalStack from the Docker Desktop. You can also see the current status of your LocalStack instance and navigate to LocalStack Web Application.
• LocalStack insights: You can see the log information of the LocalStack instance and all the available services and their status on the service page.
• LocalStack configurations: You can manage and use your profiles via configurations and create new configurations for your LocalStack instance.

To contribute, check out our issue tracker. To set up LocalStack Docker Extension for development, you can follow the steps below:

1. Clone the repository and install all the dependencies using npm:

   $ git clone https://github.com/localstack/localstack-docker-extension/
   $ cd ui
   $ npm install

2. Open the Developer Tools or create new features:

   $ make debug

3. Start the Extension on Docker Desktop and enable hot-reload using the following command:

   $ make hot-reloading

4. Disable hot reloading:

   $ make stop-hot-reloading

Most CVEs reported against this image come from the Go toolchain compiled into the service binary rather than from any dependency manifest, so they are fixed by rebuilding on a newer golang:1.26-alpine rather than by bumping anything.

The daily security rebuild does this automatically: it scans the published image, rebuilds from scratch, and republishes a new patch version only if the rebuild actually clears a CVE. Rebuilds that change nothing are not released, so no update badge appears in Docker Desktop for a no-op.

Anything a rebuild cannot fix needs a dependency bump. Dependabot raises those against vm/go.mod as security updates; they are reviewed and released with the same workflow via workflow_dispatch.

Every PR builds the image and runs the smoke test via PR CI, so a bump is verified on its own branch before it lands. Testing before the merge matters here: if you test afterwards, the next daily rebuild sees the CVE count drop and releases the bump without the test ever having run.

# What is currently published?
trivy image --scanners vuln --severity HIGH,CRITICAL --ignore-unfixed \
  localstack/localstack-docker-desktop:$(sed -n 's/^TAG?=//p' Makefile)

# Rebuild a candidate from scratch and check it still works. Builds are always
# --pull --no-cache, so a cached base layer cannot reproduce the old image and
# clear nothing. This is the same command CI runs.
make smoke-test IMAGE=dde-candidate TAG=scan
trivy image --scanners vuln --severity HIGH,CRITICAL --ignore-unfixed dde-candidate:scan

Test a change end to end in Docker Desktop with make install-extension.

Please refer to CHANGELOG to see the complete list of changes for each release.

This software is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (see LICENSE).