Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Rails now tested on Travis CI

Posted by David

Setting up continuous integration for Rails has been a complicated undertaking in the past.

Rails needs to be tested against different Ruby versions and various modes (such as running test cases in isolation/non-isolation, running ActiveRecord with identitymap enabled/disabled). This made the test suite run for an isanely long time (up to 2 hours on 1.9.2 alone) and required regular maintenance by
the Rails core team.

Over the past weeks the folks at Travis CI have been working hard to provide a better experience to Rails continous integration and today we can happily announce that
Rails is now testing on Travis CI!

Travis CI is doing a great job in providing multi-ruby testing capabilities and it is dead-simple to use. There’s some great potential to this project and it might change the way we see open-source development and testing quite a bit.

So, if you are publishing any kind of open-source code, library or web application, we recommend you have a look at it. And if you have a spare hour once in a while then consider potentially jumping on board to help improve the code base.

Travis CI is using a separate physical worker server (and a quite beefy one!) for running workers dedicated to Rails builds. This server has kindly been sponsored by the great folks over at Enterprise Rails.

[Guest post by Josh Kalderimis & Sven Fuchs]