Description

This project contains an Alexa Skill which contacts an Azure web service run by South Cambridgeshire District Council. It looks up your address and reports information about upcoming kerbside refuse collections.

Usage

If you just want to enable the skill on your device, please visit this Alexa QuickLink.

Running the test suite

To run the test suite, navigate to the lambda directory of the checkout and run:

npm test

Debugging locally in VSCode

Debugging locally within VSCode requires the use of a local DynamoDB installation. This is most easily installed and run using a Docker container, so you will need docker desktop installed.

1. In a terminal window, navigate to the dynamodb-local directory, and run docker-compose up. This will run dynamodb in a container on port 8000. You should see a summary of information about the container.
2. You can inspect the contents of the local dynamodb database with:

aws dynamodb list-tables --endpoint-url http://localhost:8000

3. Start the debugger by pressing F5
4. AWS will now begin routing requests for the development version to the local copy of the skill, until you stop the debugger again. Note there are some prerequisites to this working, so please see Amazon's documentation

References:

• DZone article on local dynamodb: https://dzone.com/articles/alexa-skill-with-local-dynamodb

• Debugging Alexa skills with VSCode: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/ask-toolkit/vs-code-testing-simulator.html

Author

Tim Cutts tim@thecutts.org

Relationship with South Cambridgeshire District Council

South Cambridgeshire District Council are not responsible for this Alexa Skill in any way, other than providing the backend web service with which it communicates.

Please do not contact them with requests for support or enhancement requests.