litexa

# The litexa project

A litexa project is a tree of files that together describe a single Alexa skill. Much of litexa relies on finding the right files in the right locations, which the generator can help set up.

# Generating a litexa project

Once you've installed the Litexa CLI you can create a new Litexa project by opening up a terminal, navigating to a directory where you have rights to create files, and typing:

litexa generate

At this point you'll get a series of questions to help you get started. For now, answer the questions with the following options:

  
    ? In which directory would you like to generate your project? hello-litexa
    ? Which language do you want to write your code in? JavaScript
    ? How would you like to organize your code? Inlined in litexa
    ? what would you like to name the project? hello-litexa
    ? what would you like the skill store title of the project to be? hello-litexa

This one command will create a new directory called hello-litexa and set up a simple Litexa project inside of it. It will also print out the file names of the files it generated to the console.

# The litexa project structure

Let's review in a little more depth what files were generated and what our application looks like.

cd hello-litexa

If we take a look at the contents of the directory we notice they look something like this

.
├── README.md
├── artifacts.json
├── litexa
│   ├── assets
│   │   ├── icon-108.png
│   │   └── icon-512.png
│   ├── main.litexa
│   ├── main.test.litexa
│   ├── utils.js
│   └── utils.test.js
├── litexa.config.js
└── skill.js

Documentation

The README.md is a great place to start after generating a project. It provides information specific to the type of project you've generated, and also includes a succinct synopsis of the contents covered in this getting started guide.

This directory contains an number of auto-generated files and folders that make up the structure of a basic litexa project. Here's a short rundown of each of the files and folders created by default:

  • README.md contains useful tidbits of knowledge pertaining to your generated project.
  • artifacts.json file stores generated information about the project.
  • litexa.config.js is your project configuration file.
  • skill.js is a representation of your skill that provides required metadata to Alexa.
  • litexa folder houses your assets, litexa files, and skill logic:
    • assets contains any images, videos and sounds you'd like to deploy with your project.
    • *.litexa files are the Litexa language files.
    • *.js files are code files. Anything defined in them will be visible in the litexa global scope.

Importing Code

As mentioned above, code files inside of the litexa directory are treated differently.

For example, variable declarations and function definitions in a JavaScript file will be globally scoped. This means require and import have limited support in this context. If you wish to organize your code in a way that you can import/require your own files, you can run litexa generate and select the As modules. or As an application. option.

For more information on this and for generation shorthands, check out the Project Structure section of the cookbook.

← Litexa code →