Running and Debugging Alexa Skills Locally
Channel: The Talking Application
Date: 2023-01-04

Making changes to an Alexa skill's fulfillment code, deploying it, and only then trying it out before making more changes and beginning the cycle all over again is an incredibly inefficient development workflow. 

The bottleneck in this flow is the deployment step. Deployment isn't horribly time-consuming, but it's still enough to create friction in the development workflow. If you could eliminate the deployment step, then the time between making a change and seeing it (or hearing it, in the case of an Alexa skill) will  reduced and you can more rapidly make progress toward the goals for your Alexa skill.

In this video, I show how to run your skill's fulfillment code on your local development machine, enabling you to make small, incremental changes and try them out without deploying the skill. Moreover, I show how to run the skill in debug mode so that you can set breakpoints in your code to step through and inspect the inner workings of your skill to chase out unexpected behavior.

If you enjoy this video, then please share and leave a comment letting me know what you think. And if you're eager to learn more about developing voice experiences for Alexa, then check out my book, Build Talking Apps for Alexa: https://pragprog.com/titles/cwalexa.