Directory Structure

You can use CJS using Typescript or Javascript and npm package manager. When you setup a project using cjs new command, you will see the following project structure:

In the index.ts file, we define our entire application, which is then used by Chitchat as a hook to generate all the artifacts, dialog engine and wire all the blocks and their implementation together automatically.

You will see a cjs.json in the root of the project. This configures the build process behavior.

Building a package

When you use cjs build to build your project, it creates a /pkg directory in your skill project. This directory will contain all the generated artifacts, your skill code etc. When you deploy using cjs deploy, it deploys the content of the /pkg directory.

TIP

You must commit this directory, because removing this directory will cause cjs to generate a new skill id. There are ways to update the skill id in the generate /pkg. But keeping /pkg in a git repo is much easier!

Build Configurations

Build configurations are defined in the cjs.json in your project root.

{
  "outDir": "./pkg",
  "target": "Alexa"
}

Config	Description	Required
outDir	Location of the output directory.	Yes
target	Platform you want to deploy to. Can be Alexa.	Yes

Deploy

Deploys the project to the target platform.

$ cjs deploy

WARNING

Make sure you have ASK CLI installed and configured. Without that cjs deploy will not work as it uses ASK CLI under the hood.