How to stop services on Travis CI running by default?

Question

The machine instances running for Travis CI start some services by default which are not useful to my project. Therefore I want to stop these services. My first idea was to use the following block in my .travis.yml to do so:

before_script:
  # Disable services enabled by default
  - sudo service mysql stop
  - sudo service postgresql stop

However, this was successful for one and failed for another machine:

$ sudo service mysql stop
mysql stop/waiting

$ sudo service postgresql stop
 * Stopping PostgreSQL 9.1 database server
   ...done.
 * Stopping PostgreSQL 9.2 database server
   ...done.
 * Stopping PostgreSQL 9.3 database server
   ...done.

...

$ sudo service mysql stop    
stop: Unknown instance:

The command "sudo service mysql stop" failed and exited with 1 during .

Another option is /etc/init.d/mysql stop but this could fail on a machine which started the process via the service command. Is there a try-catch I can use in the .travis.yml script?

Answer 1

It turns out that using the mentioned /etc/init.d/ ... works more reliable. There are some warnings that one should use sudo service ... but I was not successful with those. So here is what I am running now:

language: android

jdk:
  - oraclejdk7
  - openjdk7

android:
  components:

    # All the build system components should be at the latest version
    - tools
    - platform-tools
    - build-tools-21.1.1
    - android-19

    # The libraries we can't get from Maven Central or similar
    - extra-android-support


notifications:
  email: true

before_script:

  # Disable services enabled by default
  # http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/database-setup/#MySQL
  - sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
  - sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql stop
  # The following did not work reliable
  # - sudo service mysql stop
  # - sudo service postgresql stop

  # Ensure Gradle wrapper is executable
  - chmod +x gradlew

  # Ensure signing configuration is present
  - mv app/gradle.properties.example app/gradle.properties

script:
  - ./gradlew clean assembleDebug