Building a C Project

What This Guide Covers

This guide covers build environment and configuration topics specific to C++ projects. Please make sure to read our Getting Started and general build configuration guides first.

CI environment for C Projects

Travis VMs are 64 bit and currently provide

  • gcc 4.6
  • clang 3.1
  • core GNU build toolchain (autotools, make), cmake, scons

C++ projects on travis-ci.org assume you use Autotools and Make by default.

As a free community service, Travis CI limits build duration to about 20 minutes. Because some large C++ codebases may take very long time to build, please take care to not take too much of workers time. If you project takes longer than 10-15, please contact us on the mailing list before you add your project to Travis.

Dependency Management

Because there is no dominant convention in the community about dependency management, Travis CI skips dependency installation for C++ projects.

If you need to perform special tasks before your tests can run, override the install: key in your .travis.yml:

install: make get-deps

See general build configuration guide to learn more.

Default Test Script

Because C projects on travis-ci.org assume Autotools and Make by default, naturally, the default command Travis CI will use to run your project test suite is

./configure && make && make test

Projects that find this sufficient can use a very minimalistic .travis.yml file:

language: cpp

This can be overridden as described in the general build configuration guide. For example, to build by running Scons without arguments, override the script: key in .travis.yml like this:

script: scons

Choosing compilers to test against

It is possible to test projects against either GCC or Clang, or both. To do so, specify the compiler to use using the compiler: key in .travis.yml. For example, to build with Clang:

compiler: clang

or both GCC and Clang:

compiler:
  - clang
  - gcc

Testing against two compilers will create (at least) 2 rows in your build matrix. For each row, Travis CI C builder will export the CXX env variable to point to either g++ or clang++ and CC to either gcc or clang.

Examples