alexa-ha | Amazon Echo skill for controlling your Home Automation

Alexa HA uses the Alexa Skills Kit to communicate with your internal HA server. The Skill can be deployed in numerous ways, including:. To get started ASAP, see INSTALL-QUICKSTART.md to for setting up the Semi-direct approach. We generally prefer the second option of self-hosting a webserver and NodeJS application on the same network as your HA server/appliance, which proxies most of the communication internally behind a web server for improved security and control. In all cases external SSL encryption is required through proper trusted CA's or self signed certificates. Between the SSL transport encryption, custom application checks that confirm the requestors AWS ASK applicationId and userId match the configuration, as well as tracking all requestIds for audit trails, strong security is enforced. This ensures you and only your Echo(s) can issue commands to your HA controller. Note that due to the Amazon Echo/Alexa architecture it is NOT possible to keep everything on your local network - the voice processing must be conducted in the cloud, and you are currently required to setup port forwarding on your firewall to allow AWS access to an internally hosted application. The AWS ASK service then issues commands to your HA controller through your public facing endpoint.
Semi-direct (i.e. Echo -> AWS ASK -> NodeJS/Express -> HA)
Proxied through a webserver (i.e. Echo -> AWS ASK -> Apache/Nginx -> NodeJS -> HA)
In-cloud via AWS Lambda micro services (i.e. Echo -> AWS ASK -> AWS Lambda -> HA)
Getting started with Alexa Skills Kit
INSTALL-QUICKSTART.md
INSTALL.md