travis: Distributed CI for the Ruby community using Rails, Websockets, and Redis

Berlin based Rubyist Sven Fuchs asks if Java-based Jenkins is the best CI tool for open source Ruby projects.

Instead, imagine a simple and slim build server tool that is maintained by the Ruby community itself (just like Gemcutter is, or many other infrastructure/tool-level projects are) in order to support all the open-source Ruby projects/gems we’re using every day.

Instead of just imagining, Sven and others have been working toward that vision with Travis, an extremely alpha Rails project. Travis is a single-page application built in Rails and uses Backbone.js as a client-side MVC frontend.

How it works

By configuring a post-receive URL in your GitHub project settings, GitHub will ping Travis when new git commits are received. Travis will then schedule a build in Resque, a Redis queue. Travis then uses Websockets courtesy of PusherApp to update registered browsers on build status as it runs in the background.

Take a look at some of the projects getting built over at travis-ci.org, the project’s new home page or checkout Sven’s quick tour of Travis in this screencast:

Usage

Currently, the hosted edition of Travis is open to anyone with a GitHub account. Just sign in with GitHub. Once you’re in, grab your Travis build token and configure a post-receive URL in your GitHub project’s Service Hooks page:

http://[YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME]:[YOUR_TRAVIS_TOKEN]@travis-ci.org/builds

Host Travis yourself

If you want to run your own instance, you’ll need to set up configuration settings:

$ cp config/travis.example.yml config/travis.yml

If you want to run on Heroku, you’ll need to set some ENV variables

$ rake heroku:config

IF you’re running locally, you can start a worker with

$ RAILS_ENV=production VERBOSE=true QUEUE=builds rake resque:work

… or if you’re using God:

$ cp config/resque.god.example config/resque.god
  $ god -c config/resque.god

How you can help

Travis is in EARLY ALPHA. Sven and gang are looking for folks to help test, log issues, and submit patches. If you want to join the community, join the Google Group or hang out in #travis on IRC.

Special thanks

Sven and team would like to offer a special thanks to Pusher App for donating a Big Boy account for the project. If you’d like to pitch in with the compute side of the project, (we’re looking at you Heroku or Linode), please ping Sven.

[Source on GitHub] [Blog post] [Discuss on HN]