Skill Handler for Amazon Alexa

This is custom built skill handler for Amazon Alexa. It was developed specifically for "fairy tales" skill, but it can be easily modified to handle any other skill.

Documentation of ASK-SDK (official development kit for Alexa skills) with usage examples can be found here

Installation

Before running the application, one must install all dependencies:

npm install

Also it is necessary to create public_media folder in the project's root folder with media files that Alexa should play.

Running the Application

To run the skill handler, execute:

npm start

Tip for Development on Local Machine

For fast development and testing I utilized an SSH reverse tunnel to my server. Very useful guide with details on how to do that can be found here.

When using the SSH tunnel, one can run the code on local machine and at the same time expose it at the public URL that can be set as skill's endpoint in Amazon developer portal.

For example, to expose my local port 3000 on my public server on the port 3333 I executed:

ssh -R 3333:localhost:3000 user@mydomain.com

Configuration

Accepted environment variables:

MEDIA_URL_BASE='https://domain-with-media-files.com/'
PORT=3333