15 Serverless Offline

title: Serverless-Offline for Local Serverless Development weight: 25 date: 2026-06-28 lastmod: 2026-06-28 description: Use serverless-offline plugin for local development of serverless APIs with simulated API Gateway, Lambda execution, DynamoDB local, and hot reloading. tags: [api-development, serverless]

Serverless-offline emulates API Gateway and Lambda locally for rapid development without AWS deployment, supporting hot reloading, local DynamoDB, custom authorizers, and debugging with breakpoints.

```bash
# Install serverless-offline
npm install --save-dev serverless-offline

# Start offline
serverless offline start --stage dev --port 3000

# With custom authorizer simulation
serverless offline start --noAuth

# With DynamoDB local
npm install --save-dev serverless-dynamodb-local
serverless dynamodb install
serverless offline start

# serverless.yml plugin config
plugins:
  - serverless-offline
  - serverless-dynamodb-local

custom:
  serverless-offline:
    httpPort: 3000
    lambdaPort: 3002
    noAuth: true
    watchPath: ./handlers
  dynamodb:
    start:
      port: 8000
      inMemory: true
      migrate: true

What's Next

Now learn about serverless deploy in Building Serverless APIs.