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Starting on March 23, 2026, LocalStack for AWS will consolidate into a single image that requires authentication. Learn more about what’s changing and what this means for your setup in this blog post.

eksctl

Introduction

Section titled “Introduction”

eksctl is a CLI tool for creating and managing EKS clusters, Amazon’s managed Kubernetes service. LocalStack supports running eksctl on LocalStack to create EKS clusters locally. LocalStack’s EKS spin up embedded Kubernetes clusters using K3s to allow you to use the EKS APIs in your local environment.

Getting started

Section titled “Getting started”

This guide is designed for users new to eksctl and running EKS clusters with LocalStack. Start LocalStack using your preferred method. We will demonstrate how you can create a local EKS cluster using eksctl and fetch the nodes in the cluster.

Pre-requisites

Section titled “Pre-requisites”
  • LocalStack with LOCALSTACK_AUTH_KEY configured
  • Docker
  • eksctl (version 0.167.0 or higher)
  • kubectl

Create a cluster

Section titled “Create a cluster”

To create a cluster, you can use the eksctl create cluster command. You can use the --profile flag to specify the LocalStack profile to use for the cluster.

Run the following command to create a cluster:

Terminal window
eksctl create cluster --nodes 1 --profile localstack

Get the nodes

Section titled “Get the nodes”

You can use the kubectl command to get the nodes in the cluster:

Terminal window
kubectl get nodes