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I must admit, I had no idea what Travis CI was until today. I have never heard that name before. Today there have been two submissions for this Python/Perl support they're adding (the first one had 15 up-votes in 13 minutes). Now this one is here.
Is this some super-popular but yet not very well known (to me, at least) piece of software? Because it sure seems like they've got some pretty hardcore fans.
Travis is an open source CI system for running open source projects on. It uses a distributed setup to run the tests of projects in a sandboxed environment. The VMs also provide multiple lang versions so you can test your library against several ruby/python/perl/node/erlang/php versions without even having to think about it.
In short, Travis makes CI testing easy and fun for OS projects.
Seeing how everything is opensourced, how easy is this to get up and running on an intranet? Is that at all a goal of the project?
It is one of the eventually goals, but Travis has a lot of moving parts due to its distributed nature. We do plan to make in-house installs easier in the future.
It is pretty heavily integrated with Github. And at least last time I checked it was challenging to get it to use private Github projects. I believe the feature is on their roadmap, though.
It has certainly piqued my interest. Oh, and I just did a quick look around too and realized that yes, many people know about this software. :)
Wow, great service. The integration is very smooth. Looks like it has a lot of potential.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see many Perl users adopting this. Perl has had a similar service built into CPAN for many years. The big advantage I see in CPAN Testers is that it tests your code on about 50 different versions of Perl on about 20 different operating systems. And the only thing you need to do to use this service is upload your code to CPAN.
You are right, and we mention that in the blog post. CPAN Testers is about testing your releases, but Travis is about testing your pushes to GitHub as you develop. Travis does not aim to replicate with CPAN Testers does, we are more of a complimentary service. :)
Whoops I missed that. Thanks for explaining the difference. That feature is pretty cool.
I've already hooked my own Python project up to it (http://travis-ci.org/#!/AndrewIngram/django-extra-views) and was very pleased with how straightforward it all was.
I'd really like to see more detailed test breakdowns and code coverage reports. But I expect this will be a lot harder if there's no standardised output format for such things.
Very good work though!
Does this track the projects my project depends on?
Not yet, but in the near future. It would be awesome to run the tests of projects automagically when a dependency is updated! :)
Cool. That's the whole point of continuous integration. Everyone knows that their own stuff passes; it's "does this change break other people's stuff" that's hard to determine.
This is something I've wanted to set up for a long time. Let's chat on IRC some time?
Sure, you can find me in #travis on freenode, my handle is josh-k :)
what is the tl;dr on what Travis CI is offering vs. jenkins ? mainly that it's hosted ?
Jenkins is great for in-house installs, but Travis is currently focused on testing open source projects in a distributed and live fashion. They are not competitors as they are solving different issues. Testing open source in the open means other devs can get involved and help out when they see failures on particular setups. And you can even link to line numbers in the Travis logs, making it easier to point to the failure!