The Alexa Skills Kit Command Line Interface (ASK CLI) is a tool for you to manage your Alexa skills and related resources, such as AWS Lambda functions. With ASK CLI, you have access to the Skill Management API, which allows you to manage Alexa skills programmatically from the command line. The CLI supplement the Alexa Development Console providing functionality not available in the GUI.
ASK CLI is dynamic open source project located at github.com.
https://github.com/alexa/ask-cli
The Alexa Skills Kit Command Line Interface (ask-cli) is used to create, manage, and deploy Alexa skills from the command line.
It is a very busy project with 71 releases since November 2019 with the last major release v2 in April 2020. As of this writing it’s at version 2.22.4
The major commands are
configure
deploy
new
init
dialog
run
smapi
util
smapi has about 200 sub-commands alone to provide detail project information.
The thing to remember Alexa skills are stored on Amazon servers so that they may be executed in the Amazon environment/infrastructure to be accessed by the Amazon Echo devices. ask cli commands manage the files maintained to the Amazon servers.
configure
Handles credentials to access the project.
deploy
Amazon skills must be deployed, built and executed on Amazon Servers in locations throughout the world.
new
ask new creates projects from scratch or from sources often saved in github.com repos.
init
setup new or existing skill
dialog
Dialog interacts with a running skill
run
run starts a skill and interacts with input from dialog
smapi
hundreds of sub commands for skills management
util
Upgrades v1 projects to v2. Helps with git credentials and lwa tokens.