Internal Endpoints

LocalStack provides several internal endpoints for various local AWS services and LocalStack-specific features. These endpoints are not part of the official AWS API and are available in the /_localstack and /_aws paths. You can use curl or your favourite HTTP REST client to access endpoints.

You can start your LocalStack instance and go to http://localhost.localstack.cloud:4566/_localstack/swagger to browse the Swagger UI, visualize and interact with all the API’s resources implemented in LocalStack.

LocalStack endpoints

The API path for the LocalStack internal resources is /_localstack. Several endpoints are available under this path. For instance, /_localstack/health checks the available and running AWS services in LocalStack while /_localstack/diagnose (enable with the DEBUG=1 configuration variable), reports extensive and sensitive data from the LocalStack instance.

Tip

You can use the /_localstack/health endpoint to restart or kill the services. You can use curl or your HTTP REST client to access the endpoint:

curl -v --request POST --header "Content-Type: application/json"  --data '{"action":"restart"}' http://localhost:4566/_localstack/health
curl -v --request POST --header "Content-Type: application/json"  --data '{"action":"kill"}' http://localhost:4566/_localstack/health

AWS endpoints

The API path for the AWS internal resources is /_aws. These endpoints offer LocalStack-specific features in addition to the ones offered by the AWS services. For instance, /aws/services/sqs/messages conveniently access all messages within a SQS queue, without deleting them.