[okfn-labs] Travis CI

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 10:19 AM, Sean Hammond <sean.hammond at okfn.org> wrote:
>> Today I discovered the Travis CI (http://about.travis-ci.org) service and I
>> was wondering if OKFN has some projects using it or if you have your own CI
>> system. I think it would be awesome if OKFN provided something similar for
>> the lab projects :-)
>
> I'd be interested too. For CKAN we have a Jenkins instance that we use
> both to run the unit tests and to build the docs each time a commit is
> pushed to github, but to be honest it's a real pain to maintain and we
> don't really have enough spare developer cycles to keep it running, as a
> result it's broken all of the time and I don't think any CKAN devs look
> at it.
>
> There's just a lot of things that can go wrong, and if CKAN tests are
> failing on Jenkins, chances are 99% that it's a problem on Jenkins
> rather than a bug in CKAN, the tests are never 100% passing on Jenkins
> (i.e. it's pretty much useless). Also Jenkins' default presentation of
> the test runs it has done doesn't tell you what commit or branch it was
> testing! Even if you managed to plug all the holes in Jenkins, give a
> few days and new ones will appear.
>
> Perhaps there are some Jenkins best practices out there that we aren't
> following, and also simplifying and standardising CKAN deployment would
> help.
>
> I understand that buildbot which was previously used for CKAN had the
> same fate.
>
> With Travis CI, I worry that it will have the same problem as using
> readthedocs for CKAN did, it broke on their end and they didn't fix it
> or respond to emails, so we just had to migrate off it.

I've had the same experience with Travis CI as Vitor; it was easy to
set up and had been reliable and very useful:

https://github.com/nipy/nibabel/blob/master/.travis.yml
https://github.com/nipy/nipy/blob/master/.travis.yml

Having said that, I do put a moderate amount of work into maintaining
a buildbot instance with many slaves, because we need cross-platform
testing:

http://nipy.bic.berkeley.edu/builders

Cheers,

Matthew