alexandra 0.1.1

Toolkit for writing Amazon Alexa skills as web services

alexandra
=========

Minimal library to remove the tedious boilerplate-y parts of writing Alexa
skills.

Alexandra can be used as part of an AWS lambda function or a self-hosted
server. There's a builtin WSGI app if you're in to that kind of thing.

Check out [the api documentation](http://alexandra.rtfd.org/) for more details
on what alexandra can do.

```python

import alexandra

app = alexandra.Application()
name_map = {}

@app.launch
def launch_handler():
return alexandra.reprompt('What would you like to do?')

@app.intent('MyNameIs')
def set_name_intent(slots, session):
name = slots['Name']
name_map[session.user_id] = name

return alexandra.respond("Okay, I won't forget you, %s" % name)

@app.intent('WhoAmI')
def get_name_intent(slots, session):
name = name_map.get(session.user_id)

if name:
return alexandra.respond('You are %s, of course!' % name)

return alexandra.reprompt("We haven't met yet! What's your name?")

if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run('0.0.0.0', 8080, debug=True)
```

installing
----------

Alexandra uses `pyOpenSSL`, which requires the `libffi` library to
compile. Make sure that's installed first.

If you're on OS X, check out
[the special instructions](https://cryptography.io/en/latest/installation/#building-cryptography-on-os-x)
for installing the OpenSSL library.


And then:

`pip install alexandra`


running with uwsgi
------------------

The `alexandra.Application` class has a `run` method, which is useful enough
for testing purposes and simple projects, but for real deployments, you'll
probably want to use something a little more robust, such as uWSGI.

Alexandra works with uwsgi in almost exactly the same way Flask does.

```python
# skill_module.py

app = alexandra.Application()
wsgi_app = app.create_wsgi_app()

@app.intent('FooBar')
def foobar():
...
```

The above can be run with uwsgi as
`uwsgi -w skill_module:wsgi_app --http 0.0.0.0:5678`

setting up a web server
-----------------------

Amazon requires a real SSL certificate for skills to be rolled out to other
users, but fortunately for testing and personal projects self-signed
certificates are acceptable.

You can use
[this hacky script](https://gist.github.com/erik/119dd32efc269d6dd5d7) to
generate a self signed certificate and Nginx config which should work
well-enough for testing purposes.

After running the script, simply add a `location` block to the nginx config for
any new Alexa skills being hosted on the same box.

For example, if there's an alexandra skill running on port 6789, you would add:

```
location /some_random_endpoint {
proxy_pass http://localhost:6789
}
```


ugh it doesn't work you suck i keep getting invalid requests
---------------

Is your clock set correctly? You're going to need NTP running so your clock
doesn't drift too away from from reality.

Especially relevant if the server is running on a Raspberry Pi or some
similarly underpowered box.