Warning DEPRECATED As of April 2023 the Alexa Games team will no longer support or maintain this official distribution of Litexa. Thank you to all the folks who have used Litexa to make great Alexa skills over the years!
Litexa is an Alexa domain specific language, developed for long form multi-turn skills such as games. Its parser and tooling is implemented in Node.js and it compiles into JavaScript that expects Node.js as a runtime environment.
Full documentation is available at https://litexa.com
Disclaimer: Litexa we an Alexa Labs community-supported project (alpha) from the Alexa Games team at Amazon, where we used Litexa to develop and ship many Alexa skills. As of April 2023 we no longer support ongoing development of and with Litexa, and so this official repository is deprecated. Thank you to everyone who made great Alexa skills with this project!
The following packages are in this repo.
The compiler and common tooling for Litexa. Installing this globally installs the Litexa command line tool.
A deployment module that pushes a skill to AWS using the services: Lambda, DynamoDB, and S3. Click to learn more about the Litexa deployment module.
An extension that makes working with APL documents in your Litexa project more powerful with shorthand for managing APL documents and common design patterns. Click to learn more about the APL extension.
An extension that makes working with HTML web apps as part of the Alexa WebAPI for Games a little easier, e.g. with a statement that generates the HTML Start directive, automatically updates the skill manifest, and patches Litexa assets relative URLs.
VS Code extensions for the Litexa language that provides syntax highlighting for .litexa
files. Click to learn more about the VS Code extension.
A WAV/MP3 composer that can combine multiple overlapping samples into a single MP3 stream, and a binding layer for use in Literate Alexa. Click to learn more about the WAV audio converter.
While having split code-bases facilitates code-sharing, it comes at a cost of increased difficulty in tracking and testing features across repositories. For this reason we've decided to organize this codebase into a multi-package repository (or monorepo).
This monorepo uses Lerna to manage all of its packages.
To get started, run npm install from the root directory of the repository. This will install
the dependencies and bootstrap Lerna. Lerna bootstrap and link are called during postinstall.
To learn more, check out the
@learna/bootstrap documentation.
During development, you should install any packages you plan on modifying from the local package.
npm install -g ./packages/litexaYou can also install multiple packages at the same time:
npm install -g ./packages/litexa ./packages/litexa-apl ./packages/litexa-deploy-awsIt's important to get your base project to a consistent state. A utility function clean has been
provided for you. It removes node_modules and re-installs them for you and the runs
npx lerna clean which goes through each managed package and removes its node_modules
For more information on Lerna's clean command, check out the
@learna/clean documentation.
To test your package run
npx lerna run test --scope [package-your-developing]for example, if you wanted to run test litexa and @litexa/deploy-aws you'd run
npx lerna run test --scope litexa @litexa/deploy-awsto run all the tests, omit the scoped flag
npx lerna run testto run test coverage for your package(s) run
npx lerna run coverage --scoped [package-your-testing]to run them all
npm run coverage:lernaIntegration tests are handled outside of Lerna, by the unpublished @litexa/integration-tests package
in the ./tests directory. If you're writing an integration test, add it there. Integration tests can
also be referred to for usage examples of various Litexa features.
Note: all run does is accept an argument that it's going to use to run the npm script in your
package so all npx lerna run test is doing is going through each package and running the test
script from your package.json, if the script doesn't exist for a package it skips it.
For more information on the run command
check out the Lerna docs.
To build the entire project run
npm run buildfrom the root of the project directory. This command will do the following
- Remove and perform a clean install of the lerna project
- Clean all the package dependencies
- Clean all the test dependencies
- Look at all the packages, find any common dev dependencies or new packages and surface them up as shared dependencies in package.json
- Bootstrap and Hoist them for use with Lerna aka Bundle them
- And run the Coverage for the entire project
if this command succeeds, you should have fair confidence the code is in a good working state.
Full documentation is available at https://litexa.com. To run the documentation website locally, please do the following.
The parser source ./packages/litexa/src/parser/litexa.pegjs supports using block comments
to document individual statements. The process of refreshing the doc website is manually done
by running the command:
npm run docs:referenceTo start the docs website in interactive/watch mode, then run this:
npm run docs:devThe website will update with any change in the docs folder. For more info on Vuepress - https://v0.vuepress.vuejs.org/guide/#how-it-works
To build the full static website for S3 or GitHub hosting, run the following to get a
static render generated at docs/.vuepress/dist
npm run docs:buildSecurity is of the utmost importance. This section will describe NPM scripts that can help with making sure that the code base is as secure as possible.
NPM provides a tool that will scan and automatically install any compatible updates
to vulnerable dependencies. More on npm audit here.
To run the tool against every Litexa package, run the following from the root of the code base:
npm run audit:fixIf the tool does automatically install any compatible updates, it's advised to run
npm run coverage before you commit any changes (to make sure nothing has broken in
the update).