Bootstrap of a Travis-CI test-machine

Travis-CI is an awesome open source service which makes continuos integration really easy in the context of github-hosted projects.

Developing Orient, I found out about Travis when one of the 3 active guys actively collaborating to the project, Daniele created his own fork of the library to create the CI environment on Travis.

More than testing

Travis doesn’t only provide a machine in which you can continuosly running tests, it gives you a free VM which you can freely manage in the context of testing an application: although they don’t actually give you a “real” VM, they provide you an temporary VM which gets bootstrapped following your indications and executes the tasks that you indicate: in that sense, Travis gives you VMs on-demand.

So think about it: it’s not only about testing, it’s about having an environment ready to do anything you want for your own project, like running reports.

A real world example

For Orient, Daniele managed to setup a quite clever bootstrap script.

We have a quite comprehensive test-suite which you can execute with the single phpunit command, from the root of the library, but it just executes tests which dont directly talk to OrientDB.

To execute the full test-suite, including integration tests, you just need to pass the test directory to the CLI:

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phpunit test/

but you’ll need a working instance of OrientDB, with predefined admin credentials (admin/admin) listening on port :2480.

So our challenge was to use Travis and being able to trigger the integration tests.

In the .travis.yml configuration file, we have:

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language: php
php:
  - 5.3
  - 5.4
before_script:
  - sh -c ./bin/initialize-ci.sh 1.0rc6
script: phpunit test/
notifications:
  email:
    - [email protected]

So, as you see, we have a bash script which takes care of everything:

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#!/bin/sh

PARENT_DIR=$(dirname $(cd "$(dirname "$0")"; pwd))
CI_DIR="$PARENT_DIR/ci-stuff/environment"

ODB_VERSION=${1:-"1.0rc6"}
ODB_PACKAGE="orientdb-${ODB_VERSION}"
ODB_DIR="${CI_DIR}/${ODB_PACKAGE}"
ODB_LAUNCHER="${ODB_DIR}/bin/server.sh"

echo "=== Initializing CI environment ==="

cd "$PARENT_DIR"

. "$PARENT_DIR/bin/odb-shared.sh"

if [ ! -d "$CI_DIR" ]; then
  # Fetch the stuff needed to run the CI session.
  git clone --quiet git://gist.github.com/1370152.git $CI_DIR

  # Download and extract OrientDB
  echo "--- Downloading OrientDB v${ODB_VERSION} ---"
  odb_download "http://orient.googlecode.com/files/${ODB_PACKAGE}.zip" $CI_DIR
  unzip -q "${CI_DIR}/${ODB_PACKAGE}.zip" -d $ODB_DIR && chmod +x $ODB_LAUNCHER

  # Copy the configuration file and the demo database
  echo "--- Setting up OrientDB ---"
  tar xf $CI_DIR/databases.tar.gz -C "${ODB_DIR}/"
  cp $PARENT_DIR/ci-stuff/orientdb-server-config.xml "${ODB_DIR}/config/"
  cp $PARENT_DIR/ci-stuff/orientdb-server-log.properties "${ODB_DIR}/config/"
else
  echo "!!! Directory $CI_DIR exists, skipping downloads !!!"
fi

# Start OrientDB in background.
echo "--- Starting an instance of OrientDB ---"
sh -c $ODB_LAUNCHER </dev/null &>/dev/null &

# Wait a bit for OrientDB to finish the initialization phase.
sleep 5
printf "\n=== The CI environment has been initialized ===\n"

I think the script speaks for itsef: we directly download OrientDB from the official website, de-compress it, configure OrientDB with our standard configuration file and launch the ODB server, outputting in /dev/null.

Now, all of this happens everytime someone commits to the master on Github: pretty easy, simple but so powerful.

I really recommend you to start having a look at Travi-CI and how you can benefit from a CI server, fully configurable, for free, for the sake of your own code.

One last note: yes, all of this comes for free, but if you use Travis you should really consider making a donation to show the guys behind the project your love.