How to run travis-ci locally

Question

I've just joined a project, and I'm new to travis-ci. I'd rather not have to push every little change to .travis.yml and every little change I make to the source in order to run the build. With jenkins you can download jenkins and run locally. Does travis offer something like this?

Note: I've seen the travis-ci cli and downloaded it, but all it seems to do is call their API, which then connects to my GitHub repo, so if I don't push, it won't matter that I restart the last build.

Answer 1

This process allows you to completely reproduce any Travis build job on your computer. Also, you can interrupt the process at any time and debug. Below is an example where I perfectly reproduce the results of job #191.1 on php-school/cli-menu .

Prerequisites

• You have public repo on GitHub
• You ran at least one build on Travis
• You have Docker set up on your computer

Set up the build environment

Reference: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/common-build-problems/

1. Make up your own temporary build ID

   BUILDID="build-$RANDOM" 

2. View the build log, open the show more button for WORKER INFORMATION and find the INSTANCE line, paste it in here and run (replace the tag after the colon with the newest available one):

   INSTANCE="travisci/ci-garnet:packer-1512502276-986baf0" 

3. Run the headless server

   docker run --name $BUILDID -dit $INSTANCE /sbin/init 

4. Run the attached client

   docker exec -it $BUILDID bash -l 

Run the job

Now you are now inside your Travis environment. Run su - travis to begin.

This step is well defined but it is more tedious and manual. You will find every command that Travis runs in the environment. To do this, look for for everything in the right column which has a tag like 0.03s.

On the left side you will see the actual commands. Run those commands, in order.

Result

Now is a good time to run the history command. You can restart the process and replay those commands to run the same test against an updated code base.

• If your repo is private: ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "YOUR EMAIL REGISTERED IN GITHUB" then cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and click here to add a key
• FYI: you can git pull from inside docker to load commits from your dev box before you push them to GitHub
• If you want to change the commands Travis runs then it is YOUR responsibility to figure out how that translates back into a working .travis.yml.
• I don't know how to clean up the Docker environment, it looks complicated, maybe this leaks memory

Answer 2

Travis-ci offers a new container-based infrastructure that uses docker. This can be very useful if you're trying to troubleshoot a travis-ci build by reproducing it locally. This is taken from Travis CI's documentation.

Troubleshooting Locally in a Docker Image

If you're having trouble tracking down the exact problem in a build it often helps to run the build locally. To do this you need to be using our container based infrastructure (ie, have sudo: false in your .travis.yml), and to know which Docker image you are using on Travis CI.

Running a Container Based Docker Image Locally

1. Download and install the Docker Engine.

2. Select an image from Docker Hub. If you're not using a language-specific image pick ci-ruby. Open a terminal and start an interactive Docker session using the image URL:

   docker run -it travisci/ubuntu-ruby:18.04 /bin/bash 

3. Switch to the travis user:

   su - travis 

4. Clone your git repository into the / folder of the image.
5. Manually install any dependencies.
6. Manually run your Travis CI build command.