I’m a beginner in Alexa Skill development. Should the skill downloaded via the Alexa Skills Kit Toolkit in VSCode be added to .gitignore?
Also, where is the best place to place this skill—in the root folder, .vscode, or perhaps inside the src folder?
Good practice
No matter what framework or language are you using, github and similar(gitlab, bitbucket, aws code commit, etc) is not aimed to be a file server or host binary files. Only source code is suitable for git platforms. Along with source code files (.java, .cs, .py, .js, etc), it is also common to upload files like: xml, json, txt, csv, images (png, jpg, etc), md and any other plain formats
Anyway you can upload whatever you want but is not a good practice to upload binary or huge files. Also there is a limit.
Secrets
If you have secrets in the file, YOU SHOULD NOT UPLOAD TO GITHUB, GITLAB, BITBUCKET, ETC
Alexa Skill
If I’m not wrong, after review some samples, this skill is just a json file
https://github.com/alexa-samples/skill-sample-nodejs-howto/blob/master/skill.json
So, in this case, you can host it in your github repository.
But, if during the development of skill, you need to add some sensible information like for example an apikey , secret, etc, I suggest you to not upload it
References
- https://github.com/alexa-samples/skill-sample-nodejs-howto/tree/master
- https://medium.com/scalecapacity/build-a-custom-alexa-skill-with-aws-lambda-be85845c6cca
- https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/19/20972973/amazon-echo-alexa-how-to-add-skills-smart-home-games-sounds