Increase time-out on the Google Actions server side?

Question

NOTE: my question has nothing to do with time-outs in my app (i.e. - within my app). It has to do with wanting to know if there is a way to tell the Google Home servers to wait longer before considering my app unresponsive (i.e. - before giving up on it because they "think" it's dead.) I'm only mentioning my dev environment for the sake of completeness.

I am building a Google Home app using the Actions on Google SDK. It is an externally hosted app on my own server, running on a Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS box. The app is a Node.JS app using the Actions on Google Javascript client library, being developed using the JetBrains WebStorm IDE:

https://github.com/actions-on-google/actions-on-google-nodejs

Is there an API I can make, or a JSON package I can send during one of my interactions to the Google Home servers to tell it to increase the time-out value it uses? It would be a big help during debugging.

Right now if I try to step through a call in WebStorm IDE, the Google POST request I am servicing times out on the Google side. It appears they are using a very short time-out like 10 seconds or so. If I could increase that value drastically during development, then that would be a big help. I am experiencing this issue while using the Google Actions console app testing facility, when the Google servers contact my fulfillment URL.

Answer 1

In short: no.

The timeout is intentional - for actual conversations you want a fast response time. I understand you want it just for testing, and that does make a reasonable use case, but they don't have anything right now.

My suggestion (not a great one, I will admit, but it does have some advantages) would be to treat this like an actual test harness case. Record the JSON (or the entire HTTP transmission) from the server and play that to your webhook, then record the result and verify it is the JSON you want/expect. You can then trace through it at your leisure. Once your test harness works - try it out with the simulator.

(I tend to have lots of logging, myself.)