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Deprecation Notice

This project has been deprecated in favor of Libby, my updated fork of this project that's much more powerful, stable, and feature-rich. You should seriously consider using libby instead of this project.

Couch Potato Alexa Skill [DEPRECATED]

This is a skill built for Amazon's Alexa service that tells you about your Couch Potato queue. It allows you to ask Alexa the following:

Alexa, ask Couch Potato to add The Godfather

Alexa, ask Couch Potato to add The Godfather released in 1974

Alexa, ask Couch Potato if The Dark Knight is on the list

Alexa, ask Couch Potato if Batman 1989 is on the list

If you're just getting started developing skills for Alexa, I'd recommend reading Getting Started with the Alexa Skills Kit and Developing an Alexa Skill as a Lambda Function to get familiar with the process.

You can download a pre-packaged version of the app if you don't want to run from source..

Configuring The Skill

Open the config/default.json file and fill in the right values for your server configuration. If you use an apiKey (which you should), then you can leave username and password blank. Otherwise fill those in instead.

If you don't want to accidentally commit your configuration, then make a duplicate of the default.json file and call it local.json. It will override any configuration from default and is ignored by git.

Creating a Lambda function

The skill is built to be easily hosted on Amazon's AWS Lambda service. You'll need to create an Amazon AWS account, and then head over to the Lambda Dashboard. Once there, click "Create a Lambda function", and provide the following settings:

  1. Select blueprint: Click on Blank Function.
  2. Configure triggers: This one can be easy to miss. You should see a dotted out rounded square to the left of the Lambda logo. Click on it and from the dropdown, choose Alexa Skills Kit.
  3. Configure function:
  • Name: alexa-couchpotato. Honestly this can be whatever you want, but if you want to use the deploy function later, it's best to use the same name as the project here.
  • Description: Doesn't matter. Feel free to copy the project description.
  • Runtime: Node.js 6.10. You can choose the older version if you want, but if you do make sure to update the .babelrc file to tell babel to target the older verison of Node. If you don't know what that means, just go with 6.10.
  • Code entry type: Upload a .ZIP file. (Instructions on generating this ZIP file are below)
  • Lambda function handler and role: Under Existing role choose lambda_basic_execution.

Click Create lambda function and you're done. After you've created your Lambda function, look at the top right of the page to get your Lambda ARN number. You'll need this in the next step, so either write that number down, or keep this page open.

Deploying the Skill

If you don't care about the nitty-gritty of NodeJS projects, you can just download the alexa-couchpotato.zip file from the latest release, update the config/default.json file with your server settings, re-zip, and upload to lambda.

If you want more control, or to make your own updates to the project, check out the master branch and then do an npm install at the project root. Once all the dependencies are installed, run npm run package, which will create an alexa-couchpotato.zip file in your project directory. Back in the Lambda dashboard, look to see where it says "Upload" next to "Function package". Click upload, choose the zip file, and click save.

You can also use node-lambda to deploy to your Lambda function directly from the command line. Simply add a deploy.env file with your environment configuration (and double check the supplied .env file in this repository) and then run npm run deploy. Please visit the node-lambda project page for more information on deploying from the command line.

Setting up the Skill

To set up the skill, head on over to Alexa skills kit development console and add a new skill by following these steps:

  1. Skill Information: Fill in the basic skill information however you choose. If you're feeling uncreative, you can put alexa-couchpotato for the name, and couch potato for the Invocation Name.
  2. Interaction Model: There are two ways to do this. The first is the old/traditional way. In the Intent Schema field, copy the contents of the interaction_model/intent_schema.json file and paste them in. Then in the Sample Utterances field, copy the contents of interaction_model/sample_utterances.txt and paste those in. Make sure to Save your changes. The second way is to use the new Skill Builder. Once you have it loaded, click on Code Editor, click on the area titled "Drag and drop your .json file", and choose the interaction_model/skill_builder.json file. Click Save Model, then Build Model.
  3. Configuration: Set the Service Endpoint Type to AWS Lambda ARN, and choose your region. Now comes the time to grab the ARN from the previous step that you hopefully either wrote down or kept open in a different tab or browser window.
  4. Test: Make sure the toggle at the top is Enabled. You should now be able to test to make sure everything's working. Scroll down to the Service Simulator and in the Enter Utterance field, try asking Couch Potato one of the phrases from up top, like "is The Dark Knight on the list". If everything's working correctly, you should see data get filled in on both the Request and Response boxes. If you do, then you're pretty much done and all set.
  5. Publishing Information: This isn't necessary, but it helps the skill look nice in your Alexa app. You can fill in as much of the metadata as you like, but the one I'd really recommend is uploading an icon. An icon is included in this project and should work well for the 108x108 small icon slot.

And that's it, all done.

Testing The Skill Locally

You can use node-lambda to test this skill locally. In the test_events directory are several event files you can use for testing, and they should map pretty well to each Intent. To test an intent, simply update the EVENT_FILE value in your .env config file to point to the event to test against. Make sure you run npm install from the command line to get the the latest npm packages, and then run npm start.