Posted by m.jackson on 1 October 2015 - 2:22pm

By Mike Jackson, Software Architect.

I have just completed developing an Interoperability test harness for Provenance Tool Suite. As part of this work, I used the TravisCI hosted continuous integration server for the first time. I've now written up walkthrough of Travis CI as part of our Build and test examples on GitHub.

TravisCI is a hosted continuous integration server which can be used to build and test software hosted on GitHub. TravisCI is configured to run a build and test job whenever changes are pushed to an associated GitHub repository. See, for example, the build and test results for the Provenance Tool Suite packages ProvPy and ProvToolbox.

I was impressed by TravisCI, both by how easy it was to get started, and also how much they allow to be done within the scope of a job for example: installation of Linux packages using a package manager (which usually requires root access), downloading, building and installing third-party software, cloning of other Git repositories, and pushing build artefacts to an Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) area, if desired. And, all of this is free for open source projects!

I've now written up walkthrough of Travis CI as part of our Build and test examples on GitHub. This includes simple examples of using Travis CI to build and test C, C++, Java, PHP and Python code. It is hoped that the walkthrough will serve to help researchers and developers through the first 20 minutes of using Travis CI, to give an idea as to its potential and usefulness.

For more on continuous integration, please see our guides on Using continuous integration to build and test your software and Hosted continuous integration.