Alexa Skill using AWS Lambda in Typescript

This is a sample Alexa Skill handler based on aws-lambda-typescript.

Setup

1. Install the Serverless Application Framework as a globally available package:

$ npm install serverless -g

Verify that Serverless was installed correctly:

$ serverless -v

2. Setup AWS credentials:

Save the credentials to the ~/.aws/credentials file:

serverless config credentials --provider aws --key YOUR_ACCESS_KEY --secret YOUR_SECRET_KEY

The default profile will be used by default. If you want to use another, you can pass the --aws-profile argument to the serverless commands. E.g.:

serverless deploy --aws-profile Work

3. Clone this repository.

4. Install the dependencies:

$ npm install

5. Customize the name of your service by changing the following line in the serverless.yml file:

service: serverless-sample

6. Customize the alexa skill id by changing the following line in the serverless.yml file:

      - alexaSkill: amzn1.ask.skill.xx-xx-xx-xx-xx

Local development

During development, it's a pain to always have to deploy your lambda function to see your changes. There is a better way, you can connect Alexa to your local environment instead of Lambda, without having to make any modifications to your Lambda functions.

1. First, we will need an HTTPS endpoint. You can use ngrok for this (it's free), or any other similar tools.

$ ./ngrok http 3980 

This will give you an HTTPS endpoint which will proxy all requests to your local server (something like https://84f7599f.ngrok.io).

2. Go to your skill's dashboard at the Endpoint section.

• Instead of AWS Lambda ARN, select HTTPS.
• Now copy the https url from ngrok and paste it in the Default Region field.
• For the SSL certificate type, make sure you select My development endpoint is a sub-domain of a domain that has a wildcard certificate from a certificate authority, otherwise it will not work.
• Save the changes in the Alexa developer console.

3. Inside the project, run npm start. This will start a local http server using nodemon which will serve your lambda function.

Now, Alexa will be connected to your server, so you don't need to deploy to Lambda anymore.

Since the process is using nodemon, making any changes to the code will automatically restart the server, so your changes will be reflected to Alexa immediately.

Developer tasks

For more info, check package.json and the aws-lambda-typescript documentation.

What you can find in the code

The project contains the base structure of a project, with a dummy handler for the LaunchRequest intent which responds with "Hello, world!".

TODO

• Add example test, ideally with lambda-tester, but currently it doesn't have a Typescript definition
• Fix devDependencies being packaged as well

Read more

• aws-lambda-typescript
• Serverless Reference
• Serverless.yml Reference

License

Open sourced under the MIT license.