Okay, so I was messing around with this thing called Travis CI for a project, and I figured I’d jot down my experience. I’m no expert, but hopefully, this helps someone out there.
Getting Started
First, I went to the Travis CI website, You need a GitHub account for this, by the way. I made sure I was logged into my GitHub, then I clicked the “Sign in with GitHub” button on the Travis site. Easy peasy.
It asked me to authorize Travis CI to access my GitHub. you know, the usual stuff about reading repo data and whatnot. I clicked “Authorize” – gotta trust the process, right?
Connecting a Repository
Once I was in, I saw a list of my GitHub repositories. If you don’t see yours, there’s probably a button or a link to sync your account. I found the repo I wanted to play with and flipped the little switch next to it to “on”.
The .* File
This is where the magic happens. I had to create a file named exactly (don’t forget the dot at the beginning!) in the root directory of my project. This file tells Travis CI what to do.
Here’s a super basic example of what I put in mine:
- language: python
- python:
- – “3.8”
- script:
- – echo “Hello, Travis!”
What’s going on here?
- language: python: Tells travis, that i use python.
- python: – “3.8”: This says I want to use Python version 3.8. You can specify multiple versions if you’re feeling fancy.
- script: – echo “Hello, Travis!”: This is the command Travis will run. In this case, it’s just printing “Hello, Travis!” to the build log. I replaced this with my actual tests later.
Triggering a Build
I committed my file and pushed it to my GitHub repository. That’s it! Travis CI automatically detected the change and started a build. I could go to my Travis CI dashboard and see the build running in real-time. It showed me the output of my “echo” command, so I knew it was working.
Adding Some Real Tests
Of course, “Hello, Travis!” isn’t a very useful test. I had some simple unit tests in my project, so I replaced the “echo” command with the command to run my tests. Something like:
- script:
- – python -m unittest discover
Then every time I pushed changes to GitHub, Travis CI would run my tests and let me know if anything broke. Green checkmark good, red X bad. You get the idea.
Playing with environment variables
I wanted a customized build, and looked up the environment variables. I was able to build as I wanted through various settings.
Conclusion of My experience.
That’s my basic journey with Travis. There’s a whole lot more you can do with it, like deploying your code automatically, setting up notifications, and all sorts of other cool stuff. But this was enough to get me started, and it definitely made my life easier. Hope this was somewhat helpful!
