Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service used to build and test software projects hosted at GitHub and Bitbucket. Travis CI provides various paid plan for private projects, and a free plan for open source. TravisPro provides custom deployments of a proprietary version on the customer's own hardware. The source is technically free software and available piecemeal on GitHub under permissive licenses. The company notes, however, that the large number of tasks that a user needs to monitor and perform can make it difficult for some users to successfully integrate the Enterprise version with their own infrastructure.
Configuration
Travis CI is configured by adding a file named .travis.yml, which is a YAML format text file, to the root directory of the repository. This file specifies the programming language used, the desired building and testing environment, and various other parameters.
Operation
When Travis CI has been activated for a given repository, GitHub will notify it whenever new commits are pushed to that repository or a pull request is submitted. It can also be configured to only run for specific branches, or branches whose names match a specific pattern. Travis CI will then check out the relevant branch and run the commands specified in .travis.yml, which usually build the software and run any automated tests. When that process has completed, Travis notifies the developer in the way it has been configured to do so—for example, by sending an email containing the test results, or by posting a message on an IRC channel. In the case of pull requests, the pull request will be annotated with the outcome and a link to the build log, using a GitHub integration. Travis CI can be configured to run the tests on a range of different machines, with different software installed, and supports building software in numerous languages, including C, C++, C#, Clojure, D, Erlang, F#, Go, Apache Groovy, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Julia, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift, and Visual Basic. Several high-profile open source projects are using it to run builds and tests on every commit, such as Plone, Ruby on Rails, and Ruby. As of February 2013, over 8056 JavaScript projects use it.
Integration
Travis CI supports integration with external tools such as coverage analyzers or static analyzers. In the case of Coverity Scan, for instance, Travis CI can run the build stage under Coverity's cov-build tool, and submit the result for analysis if the build succeeds.
Company
The company is headquartered in Berlin, Germany and was founded in 2011. In 2012 the project experienced significant growth and launched a crowd funding campaign to fund further development which was sponsored by dozens of technology companies. In January 2019 it was announced that the company has been acquired by Idera, Inc.. A few weeks after the acquisition, a large portion of the old Travis team was fired.
