AWS Developer Tools Blog

Amazon DynamoDB Local Integration with AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio

Recently, the Amazon DynamoDB team released DynamoDB Local, a great tool for local testing and working disconnected from the Internet. With version 1.6.3 of the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, DynamoDB Local was integrated to make it easy to manage your locally running DynamoDB.

In order to run DynamoDB Local, you need at least a JavaSE-1.6-compatible JRE installed, but we recommend 1.7.

Getting Started

To get started with DynamoDB Local

  1. In AWS Explorer, select Local (localhost).

  2. Now right-click on the DynamoDB node and select Connect to DynamoDB Local.

    • If you already have DynamoDB Local running, you can clear the Start new DynamoDB Local process check box. In this case, the toolkit attempts to connect to a currently running DynamoDB Local at the configured port.
    • If you haven’t installed DynamoDB Local yet, you can do that here by selecting the version you want, which is most likely the latest, and click Install. This downloads DynamoDB Local to the folder “dynamodb-local” under your home directory.
  3. Ensure that you have a proper path to Java set for the Java Executable Path and click OK to start a new instance of DynamoDB Local. AWS Explorer refreshes and shows any tables that you might have set up previously.

 

Connecting to DynamoDB Local

To connect to DynamoDB Local using the AWS SDK for .NET, you need to set the ServiceURL property on the AmazonDynamoDBConfig object for the client. Here is an example of setting up the DynamoDB client, assuming DynamoDB Local is running on port 8000.

var config = new AmazonDynamoDBConfig
{
   ServiceURL = "http://localhost:8000/"
}

// Access key and secret key are not required
// when connecting to DynamoDB Local and
// are left empty in this sample.
var client = new AmazonDynamoDBClient("", "", config);