Running Alexa skills from your local machine

README.md

Running Alexa skills from your local machine

Talk to Alexa skills running on your local machine. Stop waiting for Lambda deployments. Debug step-by-step.

• Works with skills developed using the official Alexa NodeJS SDK v2.
• Uses ngrok to expose your local endpoint to Alexa and inspect requests and responses.

Setup

• Find the index.js file containing your ASK SDK NodeJS skill handler code (usually in skill-name/lambda/custom)
• Add server.js to the same folder where index.js is located

Use

• Run node lambda/custom/server.js (or wherever it is located)
• In a separate terminal, run ngrok http 8080. This will create a public HTTPS endpoint that forwards requests to your local HTTP server listening on port 8080.
• In your Alexa Developer Console go to the Build tab, and in the Endpoint section update the HTTPS endpoint with the one provided by ngrok, e.g. https://abc123.ngrok.io and check the option My development endpoint is a sub-domain of a domain that has a wildcard certificate from a certificate authority.
• Check that the skill is enabled for your account in the Test section of your Alexa Developer Console. You can also enable it using ask api enable-skill -s SKILL_ID
• Invoke the skill as usual. You should see each request on ngrok. You can open http://127.0.0.1:4040 to inspect the requests and responses.
• You can run server.js in debug mode and use breakpoints. On VS Code, open server.js and click Debug > Start Debugging

Limitations

This is an extremely simple piece of code meant only for initial testing purposes.

• Each time ngrok is executed, the public endpoint will change and you will need to update it on the Alexa console
• HTTPS is provided by ngrok. If you want to expose a public HTTPS endpoint follow this tutorial
• No access to AWS DynamoDB. Check the Alexa Developer Blog Post on how to debug locally with access to AWS resources

server.js

const express = require('express');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');

const handler = require('./index').handler;

function CreateHandler(handler) {
    return (req, res) => {
        handler(req.body, null, (err, result) => {
            if (err) {
                return res.status(500).send(err);
            }
            return res.status(200).json(result);
        });
    };
}

// create server
const server = express();
const listener = server.listen(process.env.port || process.env.PORT || 8080, function () {
    const { address, port } = listener.address();
    console.log('%s listening to %s%s', server.name, address, port);
});

// parse json
server.use(bodyParser.json());

// connect the lambda functions to http
server.post("/", CreateHandler(handler));