First, run
pip install -r requirements.txt
from the project root directory.
Go to RDS/DB Instances/know-your-nyms-dev, and use instance actions to see details. Click on the security group, and visit that group's inbound traffic list. Add a source to the list, using TCP, your IP and port 5432 (PostgreSQL).
You now can access the dev server database from your local copy!
Use the command
python manage.py runserver
to run it locally. However, this still uses the development server database. It may be slow as a result, but it's not indicative of slow code.