Run DynamoDB Locally using Docker

Amazon has the downloadable version of DynamoDB as a Docker image. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/DynamoDBLocal.DownloadingAndRunning.html

In this post, I am going to follow the documentation to run the docker image and access the database with browser (javascript) and awscli.

run

First, prepare docker-compose.yml as follows:

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

and run:

% docker-compose up

javascript

You can access http://localhost:8000/shell/ to open DynamoDB JavaScript Shell.

If you do not have a programming preference for DynamoDB yet, JavaScript may be a good choice for this reason.

awscli

You can use --endpoint-url option to use awscli to access the database.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/Tools.CLI.html

% aws dynamodb list-tables --endpoint-url http://localhost:8000
{
    "TableNames": []
}

% aws dynamodb create-table --table-name student \
   --attribute-definitions AttributeName=id,AttributeType=S \
   --key-schema AttributeName=id,KeyType=HASH \
   --provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5 \
   --endpoint-url http://localhost:8000

% aws dynamodb list-tables --endpoint-url http://localhost:8000
{
    "TableNames": [
        "student"
    ]
}

data persistence

The data is stored in ./docker/dynamodb/shared-local-instance.db

% tree -a
.
├── docker
│   └── dynamodb
│       └── shared-local-instance.db
└── docker-compose.yml

Thus, it is not deleted when the container is restarted, unless the file is removed.