HacktoberFest 2025 : The LocalStack Community Showed Up

Every October, developers around the world come together for HacktoberFest, a month-long celebration of open source collaboration. It is one of our favorite times of the year at LocalStack because it gives us a chance to welcome new contributors, improve the developer experience, and say thank you to the community that powers this project.

This year, our community brought the energy once again.

💡 Highlights from HacktoberFest 2025

Here’s what we accomplished together:

• 18 total contributions across our repositories
• 14 merged PRs improving docs, samples, and developer experience
• 15 unique contributors, including 12 first-timers
• Countless helpful conversations, reviews, and shoutouts in our community channels

Most of the activity focused on improving our documentation. Contributors clarified examples, fixed outdated sections, and made our guides easier to follow. These improvements help every developer who uses LocalStack to build and test their cloud applications locally.

✍🏾 Docs Are Code Too

HacktoberFest is often seen as a time for code contributions, but this year proved how valuable documentation updates can be. Great docs help developers understand, experiment, and succeed faster.

Many of our first-time contributors started by improving the documentation, which shows that open source is about more than code. It is about making software more accessible, improving clarity, and working together to create better developer experiences.

🧩 What We Learned

Even with a small team in October, we kept reviews moving and maintained a 78 percent merge rate. We did experience a PR backlog, which gave us a useful insight. Next year, we plan to bring in more volunteer reviewers from across the company to keep things flowing smoothly.

We also learned that clearly scoped issues lead to higher participation. At the start of the month, we encouraged contributors to choose their own focus areas. Once we introduced specific sample-app issues, participation quickly improved. For 2026, we will prepare those issues earlier so contributors can start faster and stay engaged.

🚀 What’s Next

HacktoberFest may be over, but open source collaboration never stops. We’re already planning to:

• Expand our issue templates and contribution guides
• Add more intermediate-level sample-app issues
• Host more contributor challenges and community spotlights throughout the year

If you made your first contribution this month, thank you. 🫶🏾
If you’re just discovering LocalStack, we would love to have you join us.

You can explore our repos, join the community Slack, or check out open issues anytime:
Sample App Repo | Docs Repo

🌟 Community Shoutouts

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in HacktoberFest 2025. You helped make LocalStack stronger, more accessible, and more welcoming to new contributors.

✨ Contributor Spotlight

• @ritwickrajmakhal – Added tutorials for initializing an RDS database with AWS CDK + LocalStack and for building a serverless quiz app.
• @AdityaSriram09 – Contributed schema evolution (Glue + MSK) tutorial and expanded the Lambda + S3 Image Resizer (Hot Reload) example.
• @ritoban23 – Improved documentation structure and generated IAM Policies with IAM Policy Stream.
• @HVbajoria – Migrated from deprecated LOCALSTACK_API_KEY to LOCALSTACK_AUTH_TOKEN across samples.
• @anikchand461 – Added introduction + testing sections to multiple docs for consistency.
• @ARYPROGRAMMER – Normalized S3 static website tutorial structure using Terraform.
• @abhirajadhikary06 – Updated documentation for ELB load-balancing.
• @Hark-github – Added architecture diagram + testing section to Ephemeral Application Previews tutorial.
• @Hussain-Tinwala – Created a full tutorial page for the Terraform Serverless Shipment App.
• @gagandeepp – Simulated outage documentation updates (chaos engineering focus).
• @Waqibsk – Normalized build & deploy Lambda container images (ECR).
• @sccalabr – Improved IAM Policy docs and structure.
• @tharun634 – Normalized Chaos Engineering — Route 53 Failover tutorial.
• @MayurMallavSaikia – Modernized Java Testcontainers samples with improved test assertions, wait loops, and dependency updates.
• @prak112 – Updated sample tests to migrate from API Key to Auth Token for authentication.

Every single one of these contributions made our docs and tutorials, and sample apps stronger, clearer, and more useful for the LocalStack community. If you contributed this year and do not see your name here, let us know in the community Slack so we can add you.

HacktoberFest 2025 reminded us that clarity and collaboration are what keep open source strong. Thank you for showing up, contributing your time and energy, and helping make LocalStack better for everyone.

See you next year!