Travis CI Tutorial: Getting Started

Where To Go From Here

You can download the finished project here.

This tutorial has only scratched the surface of what Travis CI can do. No, it won’t fetch you coffee, or beer, but Travis is useful for considerably more than just running tests.

Further Capabilities of Travis

• Using post-build hooks, it can upload the results of your build to an AWS S3 bucket automatically with minimal configuration.
• You can set up pre-build scripts to install and post-build remove certificates from the keychain to create signed builds.
• If you’re creating signed builds, you can also add post-build scripts to automatically upload builds to HockeyApp or iTunes Connect whenever tests pass after a merge.

Travis isn’t always sunshine and lollipops, however.

A few caveats to keep in mind:

• New versions of Xcode are not typically made available until they’ve been publicly released. This means you can’t use Travis to build a version of your app that’s using a beta SDK.
• Since they have a paid service, Travis has an incentive to upgrade everything in a timely fashion. Sometimes, however, that incentive doesn’t cause them to upgrade fast enough for everyone’s tastes. If you always need to be on the bleeding edge, keep this in mind.
• Build machines can be a bit slower than your local machine. Particularly if you’re running UI tests with KIF, you may run in to instances where the slowness of the build machine means you see race conditions you wouldn’t see on real devices, or test flakiness on the build server you don’t see locally.
• You get a lot of information in the logs from Travis, but you can’t get crash logs without setting up scripts to upload them to a third-party service after a build complete.
• All tests are run on simulators. If you have tests which must be run on a device, Xcode Bots is a better choice since it can run on both simulators and real devices – although this comes with the responsibility to manage provisioning and signing.

Want to know more?

If you’re interested in learning more about continuous integration with Travis, check out the following documentation:

• General Build Configuration Guidelines, which give a good overview of the Travis build process.
• Travis Objective-C documentation, which also covers Swift projects.
• Travis OS X CI Environment documentation, which helps determine what is or is not included in the default environment on OS X, as well as stock environment variables you can access in your .travis.yml file.

I’ve hope you’ve enjoyed this Travis CI. If you’ve got and questions then please feel free to ask them in the comments below!