Deploying Alexa Skill with already created lambda function and role
By: Prashant Bhatasana
Tags: Alexa, AWS, Pipeline, AWS Lambda, Alexa Skills

In this article, we will discuss how to deploy a custom Alexa skill that uses an already created lambda function and role.

When you are working on Alexa skill development and your role is a developer or a DevOps you should use ask-cli to create, manage, and deploy your skill with multiple staging environments.

When we are working with Alexa skill deployment with already created lambda function we are facing issues with custom lambda deployment because when we run ask deploy the command will deploy everything including skill, model, and lambda(backend) but in our case, we already created the AWS Lambda function so we don't need to deploy lambda we just need to integrate it with our skill directly.

So, we just have to deploy skills and models only, and then lambda function separately because we have a separate project directory and deployment process.

There are two cases where we have issues with the already created lambda function.

Deploy existing skills with an already created lambda function.

Deploy new skills with an already created lambda function.

Let's start our exercise

We already configured ASK-CLI in our previous discussion.

please check the above article if you don't have setup ask-cli on your machine.

→ Deploy existing skills with an already created lambda function.

Let’s Clone our skill using the following command:

ask init --hosted-skill-id <skill-id> -p <profile>

Output:

It will create a new project directory with your skill name.

cd <Created-Skill-Name>

> Now we have to Remove the lambda deployment configuration from our skill project.

To remove the lambda function configuration for doing the first deployment, we must configure ask-resource.json and .ask/ask-states.json files in a specific way

We can reinitialize the project and remove the lambda configuration. We can remove the lambda section from both files ask-resource.json and ask-states.json manually.

1. Let’s reinitialize the skill project and remove the lambda configuration.

Run the following command in the created project directory

ask init -p <profile>

This command asks some questions about skill deployment.

? ask-resources.json already exists in the current directory. Do you want to overwrite it? Yes

Enter Yes to overwrite the ask-resources.json file.

? Skill Id (leave empty to create one): amzn1.ask.skill.94f84b4a-tr50-4ac6-8tr4-788zz02g7a55

Enter Skill ID If you need to deploy skill with existing id or leave empty to create new skill ID.

? Skill package path: ./skill-package

Enter Skill package folder path default it will display ./skill-package

Click on Enter.

? Lambda code path for default region (leave empty to not deploy Lambda):

Default is ./lambda but we need to remove that because we don't need lambda deployment.

but we need to remove that because we don't need lambda deployment. Click on Enter.

Output:

It will also update both files and remove the AWS lambda configurations.

2. Let’s remove lambda configuration manually

Note: Use this if you want to remove lambda configuration manually instead of ask init command.

Open ask-resource.json and remove the lambda configuration block.

Originally:

New Code:

{

"askcliResourcesVersion": "2020-03-31",

"profiles": {

"<AKS-PROFILE-NAME>": {

"skillMetadata": {

"src": "./skill-package"

}

}

}

}

After that go to .aks/ and open ask-states.json file and remove the lambda configuration block.

Originally:

New Code:

{

"askcliStatesVersion": "2020-03-31",

"profiles": {

"<AKS-PROFILE-NAME>": {

"skillId": "<CREATED-SKILL-ID>"

}

}

}

Now Run ask deploy to deploy skills and models only.

Output:

==================== Deploy Skill Metadata ====================

- Uploading the entire skill package (it may take few minutes to build the skill metadata)...

Skill package deployed successfully.

Skill ID: <Alexa_Skill_ID>

==================== Enable Skill ====================

Skill is already enabled, skip the enable process.

Note: When we run ask deploy make sure we have added our Alexa skill id in lambda function trigger otherwise it will return an error. The trigger setting for the Lambda arn:aws:lambda:us-east-”function” is invalid. Error code: SkillManifestError

→Create new skills and Deploy with an already created lambda function.

Let’s create a new skill project using the following command.

ask new -p <profile>

It will ask some questions about skill configurations.

Select programming language for Skill.

Select backend resources type like self-hosted and manage your own hosting

Select the default startup template.

? Please type in your skill name:

Enter Skill name.

? Please type in your folder name for the skill project (alphanumeric):

Enter the project directory name.

Output:

Project for skill "<Skill-Name>" is successfully created at <FOLDER-PATH>/<PROJECT-NAME> The Project was initialized successfully.

Now Our skill initialized successfully.

> Remove the lambda configuration.

When skill initialized it will create an ask-resources.json file like

But we have to remove lambda section like

Now Let’s deploy our created skill with --target argument.

ask deploy --target skill-metadata -p <profile>

Output:

==================== Deploy Skill Metadata ====================

Skill package deployed successfully.

Skill ID: <CREATED-SKILL-ID>

> Add the lambda configuration in skill.json.

We get Skill id in the above step. Now we have to that skill id to lambda function trigger with Alexa Skill Kit.

After that add lambda configuration in the skill-package/skill.json file.

"manifest": {

"apis": {

"custom": {

"endpoint": {

"uri": "<AWS-LAMBDA-ARN>"

},

"interfaces": [],

"regions": {

"NA": {

"endpoint": {

"uri": "<AWS-LAMBDA-ARN>"

}

},

"EU": {

"endpoint": {

"uri": "<AWS-LAMBDA-ARN>"

}

},

"FE": {

"endpoint": {

"uri": "<AWS-LAMBDA-ARN>"

}

}

}

}

}

"manifestVersion": "1.0",

"permissions": [

{

. . . . . .

. . . . .

}

Now Let’s redeploy our created skill.

ask deploy -p <profile>

Output:

==================== Deploy Skill Metadata ==================== - Uploading the entire skill package (it may take few minutes to build the skill metadata)... Skill package deployed successfully. Skill ID: amzn1.ask.skill.3ab5dc2b-9d46-476c-86d1-ae81489fb86c ==================== Enable Skill ==================== Skill is already enabled, skip the enable process.

🎊 🎉🤖🎊 🎉 We deployed our skill with the already created lambda function.

In my next article, we will see how we can create an automatic deployment pipeline for our Alexa skill.

Thank you for reading, if you have anything to add please send a response or add a note!