Creating an Alexa Skill in AWS Lambda
Development Environment Setup
This project assumes that the following global packages are available, if you have not previously installed these packages then please execute the following commands:
npm install gulp-cli -g
npm install nodemon -g
How Source Is Organized
Skills
Each Alexa Skill is located in a folder within the apps folder.
So for instance the hello-world skill is in ./apps/hello-world,
and the podcast skill is in the ./apps/podcast folder.
Each of those skills it it's own package, with it's own package.json
file, and corresponding node_modules directory. This is done so that
when the skill is packaged up by gulp, all required dependencies are
within the subdirectory.
At their core, each of these skills uses the package alexa-app to
handle the creation of the various endpoints expected by the Alexa
Skills Kit (ASK).
Server
In addition to the code for the skills, this project contains a
development server. The code for this is in the file ./index.js and
uses the alexa-app-server package. This server is not deployed to
lambda, and exists solely to make local development easier.
Testing
While running the development server provides a good baseline for testing intents and their responses, it is not perfect. Indeed of the various ways to test, nothing is as sure a test as a real device. Here are some ways you can test :
- Development Server : http://localhost:4000/alexa/skill-name-here
- Echoism : https://echoism.io
- Actual Amazon Device (i.e. Echo, Dot or Tap)
Deployment
When it is time to deploy the code to AWS Lambda, simply type gulp and each
of the apps will be zipped up and put in the ./lambda folder for upload to AWS.