Debugging Travis CI is very hard.
Meghan (she/her)

Meghan (she/her) @nektro

About: 24. Local trans witch who prefers to do magic with a keyboard. she/her. Currently hacking away at making the Web less centralized.

Location:
Massachusetts, USA
Joined:
Mar 13, 2017

Debugging Travis CI is very hard.

Publish Date: Jul 16 '19
8 9

I had the "simple" goal of setting up automatic builds for my Go project. And it's been a nightmare.

https://github.com/nektro/andesite

https://travis-ci.org/nektro/andesite

The docs are hard to follow, the error messages aren't descriptive, and it has taken up most of my afternoon.

In other news, I switched from Windows to Debian on my main machine and I've been loving every second of it.

Comments 9 total

  • Arswaw
    ArswawJul 16, 2019

    Docker is good.

  • Kyle Parisi
    Kyle ParisiJul 16, 2019

    Indeed it is. My advice would be very cautious cache in your builds unless you absolutely need the time increase. Other things I've done is setup my own VM and run the commands which I'm in control of one by one. Lastly, sometimes I've seen travis-ci fail on dependencies at which point I just wait a day and try again. Patience is key if you are using their free tier.

  • Andy Zhao (he/him)
    Andy Zhao (he/him)Jul 16, 2019

    @maestromac , do you have similar feelings? 😅

  • Forest Hoffman
    Forest HoffmanJul 16, 2019

    I feel your pain. I took the time to migrate a Travis CI configuration over to Buildkite. It was infinitely better! You have to host the CI server yourself, but you can control the resources and environment.

    • Molly Struve (she/her)
      Molly Struve (she/her)Jun 2, 2020

      Any advice or gotchas to look out for when making the switch. I am thinking about taking the leap as Travis is just not featured enough for all the things we want to do.

      • Forest Hoffman
        Forest HoffmanJun 2, 2020

        It was over a year ago when I made that migration, and have since switched companies, but I don't recall anything that was glaringly difficult. I found the Buildkite documentation to be very well written. I found the Buildkite configuration to be drastically different, in that it allows for a more modular configuration compared to the Travis CI configuration. I was working on a Docker based project, so I found it very convenient that I could run my integration tests concurrently. Since Buildkite is self-hosted, I was able to ensure that my pipelines were always running consistently and fast.

        That said, I do remember having to take some extra steps to ensure that my environment secrets were secure. Buildkite has a few methods, but I used agent hooks to achieve what I needed: buildkite.com/docs/pipelines/secre...

        Best of luck! I hope it works for your use case! :)

        • Molly Struve (she/her)
          Molly Struve (she/her)Jun 2, 2020

          Thanks for the insight!

          At first glance, the BuildKite docs do look very well written which is always encouraging and from searching around, it seems like it might be a little more work to set up but a lot of people really like it.

  • Thomas H Jones II
    Thomas H Jones IIJul 16, 2019

    Debugging with a lot of frameworks isn't stellar. Often, you need to figure out "how do I force things to be meaningfully verbose". Downside to that being that, in doing so, you can end up not using the tool the way it's meant to be used.

    #Catch22

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