Lesson 12: Continuous Integration

Overview

• What Is CI?
• Automated Testing
• Tools: - Travis CI - Jenkins

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration is a name for any kind of automated tool that performs the following tasks:

1. Detects changes to your project
2. Runs a suite of tests on the changed code
3. Alerts the people that care if something good/bad happened

Automated Testing

• Automated testing is the most common
• Integrates with Github (or similar service such as GitLab)
• Detects changes to the code base and runs tests automatically
• If it finds a problem, notify people who need to know

Tool: Travis CI

Travis CI is very popular among Github users because it is easy to setup with Github projects and integrates well with Github workflows. It's also free for Open Source projects, although the service itself is not Open Source.

Runs test suites for:

• C / C++
• Java
• Javascript
• Python
• Ruby
• Many more on the Travis CI docs!

Tool: Jenkins

Jenkins is a more powerful version of Travis, but as a result is more complicated to use and set up. While you can pay to use a public instance of Jenkins, it is more common to run your own instance of Jenkins.

• Does pretty much anything you can tell a computer to do, automatically.
• Builds and uploads binaries (releases).
• Runs tests.
• Reports build successes/failures.
• Also has plugins!

TODO: Setup Travis on a GH Repo

We've spent the past two lessons building and testing a web app. Now, let's upload it to Github and set up CI on it.

Please follow the guide on the website.

Further Reading

Jenkins Documentation

The Jenkins project documentation. If you need a broad overview read the Getting Started with... docs.

TravisCI Documentation

If you end up working on a large project on GitHub you're going to interface with TravisCI sooner or later.

CircleCI Documentation

CircleCI is a tool we didn't get to touch on. It is very similar to Travis.