Travis CI

Today I discovered Travis CI. Something fun to do on a Saturday!

Their claim is:

Test and Deploy with Confidence

Easily sync your GitHub projects with Travis CI and you’ll be testing your code in minutes!

I found the idea of using a public CI for testing my github project to be really exciting. Even though I don’t work at ResMed anymore, I created test tools that relied on my github project. Because they use jruby, I wanted to make sure the library worked on multiple versions of ruby/jruby. This is a solution for that.

To begin with, I attached my github account to travis-ci and selected the project to test against. Their instructions were very easy so I won’t go into them.

The first task I had was cleaning up. I had allowed the project to get messy. I had temporarily taken out yard because jruby didn’t like installing the redcarpet gem (I couldn’t find an alternative for it). I had to clean up the checks that were using should instead of the more modern expect. And the gemspec was out of date.

group :development do
 gem 'bundler'
 gem 'rake'
 gem 'cucumber'
 gem 'fig_newton'
 gem 'rspec'
 gem 'webmock'
 gem 'rubocop'
 if ENV["JRUBY"] || RUBY_PLATFORM == "java"
  # Skip the yard gems for jruby
 else
  gem 'yard'
  gem 'yard-cucumber'
  gem 'redcarpet'
 end
end

Second, I updated my rake file to be flexible enough to only create yardoc using ruby. I don’t need to create documentation in every version of ruby. It just needs to run.

if ENV["JRUBY"] || RUBY_PLATFORM == "java"
 # Skip the yard gems for jruby
else
 require 'yard'
 # rake yard
 YARD::Rake::YardocTask.new do |t|
 t.files = ['lib/**/*.rb', 'features/**/*.feature', 'features/**/*.rb']
 end
end

Next, I created a .travis.yml file. I tried to keep it simple enough:

language: ruby
rvm:
 - 2.0.0
 - 2.1.0
 - 2.2.0
 - jruby-19mode # JRuby in 1.9 mode

Then I had to merge to trunk. That was tough but only because I let myself get messy.

The results were great.  I knew that my cukes worked on four different versions of ruby/jruby, and even which was faster.

Conclusion

I would recommend to use this for small opensource projects like mine. The cool thing was to learn a little more about rake.

It could work for larger ones, but I didn’t qualify that.