Alexa Deploy - ask deploy tries to recreate user for every deploy? Response is invalid in text test?

Question

I'm trying to setup my Amazon Alexa right now and it's been giving me some troubles. Here are the steps I've done and the problems I've run into.

I installed the AWS CLI and ASK (Alexa Skill Kit) CLI

I ran aws configure with an IAM user on AWS

I then ran ask deploy --profile <aws configure username>

For every permission error I had while running this command, I added the permission to the already existing IAM user I created. The command also created it's own IAM role which I had to delete each time I re-ran the command.

Once I got the command to work once, a Lambda function and Alexa Skill were created for me. Yay!

However, the Alexa skill has to be reconfigured with each ask deploy run and the ask deploy command tries to recreate a user every time I run it. This isn't terrible because the ask deploy command still updates the Alexa Skill. However, I haven't been able to get my Alexa Skill working at all with text input and I'm wondering if it's an issue with how I setup the ASK.

Trying to create a new user:

-------------------- Update Skill Project --------------------
Skill Id: amzn1.ask.skill.6eb4f796-8a23-4745-8d3a-5d2b2af5166e
Skill deployment finished.
Model deployment finished.
Create role error.
EntityAlreadyExists: Role with name ask-lambda-EKO already exists

The error I get when trying the Service Simulator with text is:

The response is invalid

Any help would be appreciated.

Edit

I've enabled stack traving in the Lambda function and my requests in the text test in the Alexa Skill are returning 200 OK statuses in the stack trace.

José Quinto Zamora José Quinto Zamora · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-25T19:41:26

Try to configure skill.json and .ask/config like this:

skill.json:

"apis": {
  "custom": {
    "endpoint": {
      "sourceDir": "lambda/custom"
    }
  }
}

.ask/config:

"apis": {
  "custom": {
    "endpoint": {
      "uri": "arn:aws:lambda:eu-west-1:XXXXXXXXXXXX:function:lambdaName"
    }
  }
}

source: https://blog.josequinto.com/2018/04/25/deploy-alexa-skill-using-already-created-lambda-function-and-role/#Deploy-the-skill

Alexa Deploy - ask deploy tries to recreate user for every deploy? Response is invalid in text test?

1 Answers