Saving snapshots to S3

By default, Cloud Pod artifacts are stored on the LocalStack platform. However, if your organization’s data regulations or sovereignty requirements prohibit storing snapshots in LocalStack’s managed storage, saving directly to your own Amazon S3 bucket is the recommended solution for keeping full control over where that data lives.

When saving, loading, or listing snapshots in your own S3 bucket, lstk uses pre-signed S3 URLs to transfer the data directly between the emulator and your bucket, without proxying it through LocalStack’s platform.

Using the lstk CLI

The lstk snapshot command lets you save, load, and list snapshots stored in your own S3 bucket by passing an s3://bucket/prefix location alongside a snapshot name.

The initial step is to export the necessary AWS credentials in your terminal session.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=...
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=...

To obtain credentials automatically, use AWS SSO CLI. Alternatively, set AWS_PROFILE or pass --profile <name> to have lstk read credentials from a named AWS profile instead of the environment.

To save a snapshot to your S3 bucket, provide a snapshot name followed by the s3:// location:

lstk snapshot save my-snapshot s3://ls-s3-bucket-example

Output

✔︎ Snapshot saved to s3://ls-s3-bucket-example as "my-snapshot"
• Version: 1
• Size: 74.6 KB

Caution

Snapshots are transferred to a real Amazon S3 bucket, so transparent endpoint injection must be disabled. Otherwise LocalStack’s DNS server resolves the AWS domains back to the emulator, and the transfer never reaches your bucket.

Disable this feature by setting DNS_ADDRESS=0 when starting the emulator. On the command line, use LOCALSTACK_DNS_ADDRESS=0 lstk start — host variables prefixed with LOCALSTACK_ are forwarded to the emulator. In a config.toml environment profile, use the unprefixed form DNS_ADDRESS = "0".

Once the snapshot has been saved, you can confirm the presence of the snapshot artifacts in the S3 bucket by running:

aws s3 ls s3://ls-s3-bucket-example

Output

2026-08-05 10:08:55      76390 localstack-pod-my-snapshot-state-1.zip

You can then use lstk snapshot load to load the previously saved snapshot:

lstk snapshot load my-snapshot s3://ls-s3-bucket-example

Output

✔︎ Snapshot loaded from s3://ls-s3-bucket-example (my-snapshot)

Similarly, you can list the snapshots stored in this bucket with lstk snapshot list:

lstk snapshot list s3://ls-s3-bucket-example

Output

~ 1 snapshot

  NAME         VERSION
  my-snapshot  1

Note

Because data transfer is performed by the emulator rather than the CLI, saving, loading, and listing snapshots in your own S3 bucket require a running emulator.

Comprehensive instructions on using the lstk snapshot CLI command, including credential resolution order, are found in the lstk CLI Guide.