We just shipped MiniStack v1.1.0. This is the biggest release since the initial launch — full Amazon Cognito support, a complete test suite overhaul, and a pile of infrastructure fixes that make running MiniStack day-to-day significantly cleaner.

If you're not familiar: MiniStack is a free, open-source local AWS emulator. One port, no account, no license key. A drop-in replacement for LocalStack — which moved its core services behind a paid plan.

This was the most requested feature since launch. v1.1.0 ships complete Cognito support across both planes:

User Pools (cognito-idp)

Identity Pools (cognito-identity)

OAuth2

Stub JWTs are structurally valid base64url tokens — they pass format checks in most SDKs without needing real crypto.

We merged a separate QA test file into the main suite and fixed every test bug we found along the way:

613 tests across all 25 services. Single file. All passing.

This one was subtle. Every RDS (CreateDBInstance) and ElastiCache (CreateCacheCluster) call spins up a real Docker container. The postgres and mysql images declare VOLUME /var/lib/postgresql/data — so Docker was creating an anonymous volume for every container, even after the container was removed.

After 20 test runs: 30+ dangling volumes, 600MB+ of wasted space.

Two fixes:

Clean up what you already have:

Every container MiniStack spins up is labelled ministack=true. The purge target uses that label — it won't touch your other Redis, Postgres, or MySQL containers.

A user reported credentials failing. The README was showing aws configure --profile local but then omitting --profile local from the example commands. Fixed — two working options now documented:

Option A — environment variables

Option B — named profile

GitHub: github.com/Nahuel990/ministack

25 AWS services. Free. MIT licensed. No account required.

Issues and PRs welcome.