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Why Travis CI is great for the Python community

In the unlikely event you’re both reading my blog, and have not heard of Travis CI, it’s a CI service which specifically targets open source projects. It integrates nicely with Github, and is generally a pleasure to work with.

I think it’s particularly valuable for the Python community, because it makes it easy to test against a variety of Pythons, which maybe you don’t have at your fingertips on your own machine, such as Python 3 or PyPy (Editor’s note: Why aren’t you using PyPy for all the things?).

Travis makes this drop dead simple, in your .travis.yml simply write:

language: python
python:
    - "2.6"
    - "2.7"
    - "3.2"
    - "3.3"
    - "pypy"

And you’ll be whisked away into a land of magical cross-Python testing. Or, if like me you’re a fan of tox, you can easily run with that:

python: 2.7
env:
    - TOX_ENV=py26
    - TOX_ENV=py27
    - TOX_ENV=py32
    - TOX_ENV=py33
    - TOX_ENV=pypy
    - TOX_ENV=docs
    - TOX_ENV=pep8

script:
    - tox -e $TOX_ENV

This approach makes it easy to include things like linting or checking your docs as well.

Travis is also pretty great because it offers you a workflow. I’m a big fan of code review, and the combination of Travis and Github’s pull requests are awesome. For basically every project I work on now, I work in this fashion:

• Create a branch, write some code, push.
• Send a pull request.
• Iteratively code review
• Check for travis results
• Merge

And it’s fantastic.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Travis CI consistently gets better, without me doing anything.