Setting up DynamoDB for local development

Sep 22, 2023 · 388 words · 2 minute read

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Amazon DynamoDB is managed, serverless key-value NoSQL database that is quite popular among AWS users/developers. It is a great choice for applications that require low latency and flexible data models. When developing applications that use DynamoDB, it is a good idea to have a local instance of DynamoDB running on your machine. This will allow you to develop and test your application without having to connect to the cloud. In this short post, I will share how I set up DynamoDB for local development and for writing integration tests.

Prerequisites

The only prerequisite is to have Docker installed on your machine.

Docker Compose

The easiest way to set up DynamoDB locally in my opinion is to use Docker Compose. And the content of the `docker-compose.yml` file is as follows:

version: '3.8'
services:
 dynamodb-local:
   command: "-jar DynamoDBLocal.jar -sharedDb -dbPath ./data"
   image: "amazon/dynamodb-local:latest"
   container_name: dynamodb-local
   ports:
     - "8000:8000"
   volumes:
     - "./docker/dynamodb:/home/dynamodblocal/data"
   working_dir: /home/dynamodblocal

This will create a container named `dynamodb-local` and expose port `8000` on your machine using `amazon/dynamodb-local` image. To start the container, run the following command:

docker-compose up -d

And that's it! You now have a local instance of DynamoDB running on your machine. To test the setup you can use the AWS CLI or write a simple application that connects to DynamoDB. Using the AWS CLI, you can run the following command to list all tables:

aws dynamodb list-tables --endpoint-url http://localhost:8000

If you want to use a simple NodeJS application to test the connection, you can use the following code:

 
const { DynamoDBClient, ListTablesCommand } = require('@aws-sdk/client-dynamodb');
const main = async () => {
  const client = new DynamoDBClient({
    region: 'us-east-1',
    endpoint: 'http://localhost:8000',
  });

  const command = new ListTablesCommand({});
  const response = await client.send(command);
  console.log(response.TableNames);

};

I prefer to use the second approach because it gives me more flexibility in terms of accessing DynamoDB, and I also can use and modify the code to test different scenarios and doing experiments before writing the actual code.

Conclusion

In this post, I shared how I set up DynamoDB for local development. I hope you found it useful. If you're interested in learning more about DynamoDB, I recommend checking out the official documentation.

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Also, I'm available for consulting and freelance work.
If you need help with your AWS infrastructure, feel free to reach out to me at
helloismajl@gmail.com