AWS DynamoDB Local

A simple npm package for installing Amazon's DynamoDB database locally for testing your applications.

DynamoDB is a highly scalable noSQL database system available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). You can read more about it from its official site.

Prerequisite: Java version 6 or above must be available on the system

Installation (Standalone)

You can install the package globally if you want to run the database server from command line.

$ npm install -g aws-db

Once the aws-db package is installed. You should be able to start the dynamodb database server from command line.

$ aws-db

Usage

By default DynamoDB is ran on port 8000, and an in-memory database is used. You can pass command line parameters to change the port, and use a persistent storage for database.

$ aws-db 8080
Runs dynamodb in port 8080

$ aws-db 8080 data
Runs dynamodb in port 8080 with persistent storage in a folder named data in the current directory.

Installation (With testing frameworks)

If you are developing your application on nodejs and want to use dynamodb with your test frameworks like mocha, you could install the dynamodb database in your package as a development dependency and run the database server programmatically from within your test framework.

$ npm install --save-dev aws-db

or

$ yarn add --dev aws-db

Once installed on your package, you could start the dynamodb server by importing the library

// Your test file
const dynamoDB = require('aws-db');

// Start the dynamoDB server
const shutdownDynamoDB = dynamoDB();

...
...

// Once you are done, you can (should) shutdown the server at the end
shutdownDynamoDB();

function dynamoDB(port, dbPath, delayTransitionStatuses)

The package exports a method, that is used to start the dynamodb server. The method can be passed 3 parameters:

port
TCP port on which to run the database server. Default 8000.

dbPath
The location where the database server creates the database files. If this value is omitted (or null), in-memory database is used which is not persistent.

delayTransitionStatuses
The local database server are extremely fast and don't take time for most of the operations, which is not the case when you are using the service online on AWS. To simulate a similar environment, you could enable a delay on the local database. Just pass true if you want to enable delays on certain functions.

Please check the AWS documentation for more information on these parameters.

The sharedDb flag is always set.

The function returns a function that should be used to shutdown the server at the end of the execution of your tests.