Getting started with Serverless and Alexa development
(Image Credit/Source: Amazon Blog)
More and more I see myself tinkering around with serverless development.
To get started, I had to decide what I was going to use for development, so I started with installing node.js.
Node.js is available for multiple operating systems and can be downloaded here.
Once I downloaded node.js, I used npm to install serverless, e.g.:
npm install -g serverless
I set up my credentials using the following command:
serverless config credentials --provider aws --key AKexampleKey --secret wJalrexampleSecret
You can also install the ask (Alexa Skills Kit) cli using npm:
npm install -g ask-cli
As I plan on doing Alexa skill development, I need to associate my AWS profile with my Alexa development profile. Excellent documentation provided by AWS can be found here.
I initialized the ask cli with the AWS account (using a key and secret set up previously):
ask init --aws-setup
I then associate the Amazon Developer account with the ask cli:
ask init
We can now start to create our Alexa skill and any associated Lambda functions that would be called as part of the skill, e.g.: ask new and ask deploy.