MacBook Not Using lambda/custom Directory

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Aardvark asked · Aug 03, 2018 at 02:00 PM

MacBook Not Using lambda/custom Directory

I have been doing Skill development on Windows machines the last several months. I backup the top level directory that contains the various Skill projects to a thumb drive and deploy them on other Windows systems that I use (yes, primitive compared to doing it via the cloud - I do backup the projects to a non-public personal S3 bucket for safe keeping via "aws s3 sync").

I finally decided to put a Skill development and deployment environment on my MacBook as I travel with that and my Windows systems are desktops that do not travel. I extracted the contents of the thumb drive and got my project root all set up. Of course the first problem I ran into was the skill.json having "lambda\\custom" defined instead of "lambda/custom" as the endpoint sourceDir. Simple enough to fix and the missing directory error went away from "ask deploy". However, the skill fails to run with CloudWatch reporting that the index module could not be found. I checked permissions and anything else relevant and found no problems. I decided to clone the Skill into an empty directory and see what it returned. Low and behold, it creates a "lambda/us-east-1_ask-custom-Skill-Name-default" (Skill-Name is the Skill's name) directory, which is empty, and no "custom" directory. Frustrated I went to my Windows system and re-deployed the Skill, which has a "custom" directory, and it started working again. I went back to the MacBook and cloned the Skill to another empty directory and again the "us-east-1_ask-custom-Skill-Name-default" was created but this time it was populated with my files.

My question is, why is the lambda code directory name different on my MacBook versus the Windows system's? "lambda/custom" is correctly defined in the skill.json file but it is being ignored by "ask deploy" v1.4.1. "ask clone" is not creating a "custom" directory but instead the "us-east-1_ask..." directory. I executed the same command under Windows to test and "custom" is still being created. If this is standard behavior it is definitely pain for development across different platforms.

lambda ask cli

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2 Answers

Answer 1 · 2018-08-07T06:11:53Z

Ron Wang answered · Aug 07, 2018 at 06:11 AM

Hi Aardvark,

Thank you for your post and sorry for the CloudWatch reporting... We didn't expect our user will depend on the name of the folder...

This is actually an assumably backward-compatible change we introduce during the v1.4 release. We were using the skill type as the Lambda file path. But this turns out not very ideal as now a Lambda function can work crossing skill types. You can set ASK and SmartHome trigger for a single Lambda function. We need to make sure the Lambda resource code doesn't exist more than once in the skill's Lambda code.

Thus, the reason why you see "custom" folder remains custom is because it's a deploy logic; but when you once clone it, it will be starting to use the new Lambda file path logic.

Thanks,

Ron

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Aardvark · Aug 07, 2018 at 10:32 AM

Unfortunately "custom" has been the directory that is documented in all the developer documents and all the Alexa code examples on Github use this directory.

I seem to have no problems still deploying with "custom" on Windows but I had not had any luck successfully deploying from my Mac even with the skill.json pointing to "custom". I wind up uploading my edits to a Windows system and deploying there. I suspect the deploy logic is not quite right on the Mac platform.

Is there going to be a change in the documentation to eliminate "custom"? Otherwise it will get very confusing for people when that directory is no longer present.

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Ron Wang Aardvark · Aug 09, 2018 at 03:22 PM

Can you show me your error message from the Mac deploy? The logic in CLI is OS-agnostic. Both Windows and Mac are supposed to have the same logic. Because the lambda file mapping is defined in the skill.json, version before or after v1.4 should both work. Since it's backward-compatible, we may not modify the previous code examples, but yes we will call it out in the document for the next update!

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Aardvark Ron Wang · Aug 10, 2018 at 04:00 PM

It makes sense that it should be platform agnostic. There was never any error returned yet at the time Cloudwatch reported that index could not be found.

Now I just ran the whole procedure again and this time it worked. I took a ZIP file containing my project and did "unzip -X" on the Mac. skill.json had:

    "apis": {
      "custom": {
        "endpoint": {
          "sourceDir": "lambda\\custom"
        },

so I changed that to the following as I did before:

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

Followed that with:

ask deploy -t lambda
Lambda deployment finished.
Lambda function(s) updated:
  [Lambda ARN] 
arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:399485956123:function:ask-custom-Skill-Name-default

After that completed I ran the skill on my Echo Show and this time it executed. No missing index file now. This was the exact procedure I followed when I first did the deployment from the Mac and happened with two skills. There were no deployment errors BUT the skill had no Lambda code.

I am glad it is working now. I did, in the interim, do "npm update" on the projects as well as global modules. Could this problem have been related to out-of-date Node.js modules? Either way it is working now and that is all I need since it is better than having to copy the projects over to a remote Windows system to deploy. Clone still loads the files into "us-east-1_ask-custom-Skill-Name-default" but that is easy enough to rename. It would be nice if it did a reverse name map and created the custom directory in order to avoid the renaming step.

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Answer 2 · 2018-08-03T17:44:34Z

Aardvark answered · Aug 03, 2018 at 05:44 PM

I just did a clone on a Windows system and I now got the same "lambda/us-east-1_ask-custom-Skill-Name-default" directory created too. Also my skill.json has a sourceDir setting of ".\\lambda\\us-east-1_ask-custom-Skill-Name-default". Am I to gather this is an unannounced/undocumented change to lambda function deployment?

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MacBook Not Using lambda/custom Directory

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