Getting started

Travis CI Overview

Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community. It is integrated with GitHub and offers first class support for:

Our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.org means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

travis-ci.org originally started as a service for the Ruby community in early 2011 but has added support for many other technologies since then.

As a free community service, Travis CI limits build duration to about 20 minutes. Because some larger codebases may take a very long time to build, please take care to only use a reasonable amount of worker's time.

Step one: Sign in

To get started with Travis CI, sign in through GitHub OAuth. Go to Travis CI and follow the Sign In link at the top.

GitHub will ask you to grant read and write access. Travis CI needs write access for setting up service hooks for your repositories when you request it, but it won't touch anything else.

Step two: Activate GitHub Service Hook

Once you're signed in go to your profile page. You'll see a list of your repositories. Flip the on/off switch for each repository that you want to hook up on Travis CI. Then visit the GitHub service hooks page for that project and paste your GitHub username and Travis token into the settings for the Travis service if it is not already pre-filled.

If your repository belongs to an organization or flipping the switch did not set up the hook, please set it up manually on GitHub. It will take just a couple of minutes.

Step three: Add .travis.yml file to your repository

In order for Travis to build your project, you need to tell the system a little bit about it. To do so, add .travis.yml to the root of your repository. We will only cover basic .travis.yml options in this guide. The most important one is the language key. It tells Travis what builder to pick. Ruby projects typically use different build tools and practices than Clojure or PHP projects do, so Travis needs to know what to do.

If .travis.yml is not in the repository, is misspelled or is not valid YAML, travis-ci.org will ignore it, assume Ruby as the language and use default values for everything.

Here are some basic .travis.yml examples:

C

language: c
compiler:
  - gcc
  - clang
# Change this to your needs
script: ./configure && make

Learn more about .travis.yml options for C projects

C++

language: cpp
compiler:
  - gcc
  - clang
# Change this to your needs
script: ./configure && make

Learn more about .travis.yml options for C++ projects

Clojure

For projects using Leiningen 1:

language: clojure
jdk:
  - oraclejdk7
  - openjdk7
  - openjdk6

For projects using Leiningen 2:

language: clojure
lein: lein2
jdk:
  - openjdk7
  - openjdk6

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Clojure projects

Erlang

language: erlang
otp_release:
  - R15B02
  - R15B01
  - R14B04
  - R14B03

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Erlang projects

Haskell

language: haskell

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Haskell projects

Go

language: go

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Go projects

Groovy

language: groovy
jdk:
  - oraclejdk7
  - openjdk7
  - openjdk6

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Groovy projects

Java

language: java
jdk:
  - oraclejdk7
  - openjdk7
  - openjdk6

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Java projects

Node.js

 language: node_js
 node_js:
   - "0.10"
   - "0.8"
   - "0.6"

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Node.js projects

Objective-C

 language: objective-c

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Objective-C projects

Perl

language: perl
perl:
  - "5.16"
  - "5.14"
  - "5.12"

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Perl projects

PHP

language: php
php:
  - "5.5"
  - "5.4"
  - "5.3"

Learn more about .travis.yml options for PHP projects

Python

language: python
python:
  - "3.3"
  - "2.7"
  - "2.6"
# command to install dependencies, e.g. pip install -r requirements.txt --use-mirrors
install: PLEASE CHANGE ME
# command to run tests, e.g. python setup.py test
script:  PLEASE CHANGE ME

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Python projects

Ruby

language: ruby
rvm:
  - "1.8.7"
  - "1.9.2"
  - "1.9.3"
  - jruby-18mode # JRuby in 1.8 mode
  - jruby-19mode # JRuby in 1.9 mode
  - rbx-18mode
  - rbx-19mode
# uncomment this line if your project needs to run something other than `rake`:
# script: bundle exec rspec spec

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Ruby projects

Scala

 language: scala
 scala:
   - "2.9.2"
   - "2.8.2"
 jdk:
   - oraclejdk7
   - openjdk7
   - openjdk6

Learn more about .travis.yml options for Scala projects

Validate Your .travis.yml

We recommend you use travis-lint (command-line tool) or .travis.yml validation Web app to validate your .travis.yml file.

travis-lint requires Ruby 1.8.7+ and RubyGems installed. Get it with

gem install travis-lint

and run it on your .travis.yml:

# inside a repository with .travis.yml
travis-lint

# from any directory
travis-lint [path to your .travis.yml]

travis-lint will check things like

  • The .travis.yml file is valid YAML
  • The language key is present
  • The runtime versions (Ruby, PHP, OTP, etc) specified are supported in the Travis CI Environment
  • That you are not using deprecated features or runtime aliases

and so on. travis-lint is your friend, use it.

Step four: Trigger Your First Build With a Git Push

Once GitHub hook is set up, push your commit that adds .travis.yml to your repository. That should add a build into one of the queues on Travis CI and your build will start as soon as one worker for your language is available.

To start a build you can either commit and push something to your repository, or you can go to your GitHub service hooks page and use the "Test Hook" button for Travis. Please note that you cannot trigger your first build using Test Hook button. It has to be triggered by a push to your repository.

Step five: Tweaking your build configuration

Chances are, your project requires some customization to the build process. Maybe you need to create a database before running your tests or you use build tools different from what Travis defaults are. Worry not. Travis lets you override almost everything. See Build Configuration to learn more.

After making some changes to the .travis.yml, don't forget to check that it is valid YAML and run travis-lint to validate it.

Step six: Learn more

A Travis worker comes with a good amount of services you might depend on, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, memcached and others.

See Database setup to learn how to configure a database connection for your test suite. More information about our test environment can be found in a separate guide.

Step seven: We are here to help!

For any kind of questions feel free to join our IRC channel #travis on chat.freenode.net. We're there to help :)