ASK CLI has hook to deploy / clone your skill. You can check exists hooks in the hooks/directory.

Example hook

From: https://github.com/alexa/skill-sample-nodejs-trivia/blob/en-US/hooks/pre_deploy_hook.sh

SKILL_NAME=$1
DO_DEBUG=${2:-false}
TARGET=${3:-"all"}

if [ $DO_DEBUG == false ]
then
    exec > /dev/null 2>&1
fi

install_dependencies() {
    npm install --prefix "$1" >/dev/null 2>&1 
    return $?
}

echo "###########################"
echo "##### pre-deploy hook #####"
echo "###########################"

if [[ $TARGET == "all" || $TARGET == "lambda" ]]; then
    grep "sourceDir" ./skill.json | cut -d: -f2 |  sed 's/"//g' | sed 's/,//g' | while read -r SOURCE_DIR; do
        if install_dependencies $SOURCE_DIR; then
            echo "Codebase ($SOURCE_DIR) built successfully."
        else
            echo "There was a problem installing dependencies for ($SOURCE_DIR)."
            exit 1
        fi
    done
    echo "###########################"
fi

exit 0

The hook is to run the npm installcommand before deploying your Lambda function. (The hook result and progress cannot see by default, you need to add --debugoptions.)

Use case

The most popular case is to build the TypeScript. You can run build by TypeScript by the following code.

install_dependencies() {
    npm install --prefix "$1" >/dev/null 2>&1 
    npm run build --prefix "$1"
    return $?
}

More idea

Of course we can run the Serverless Framework or SAM or CloudFormation.

Let’s make a new hook for your Alexa development environment 🙂