Definition: the practice of frequently integrating one's new or changed code with the existing code repository -Wikipedia
Merging new code into master often sounds awesome, but we've been learning the value of testing and the importance of a passing test suite.
But, as your projects grow, your test suite should grow as well. We're all lazy and forget to run the entire test suite everytime we create a new commit. For large projects, running the entire test suite can take hours. So we do what all lazy people do, make a computer to the work for us.
...and I don't want to wait for a million tests to run, don't you realize I have things to do??
A build server will be responsible to run the entire test suite after ever commit and let you know if any tests failed. That way when your change to the User model breaks the Vote creation integration test, you'll be notified (email) without having to run every test yourself.
If your build passes, then you know you're ready to merge into master.
As you begin to push your apps to production, you don't want to introduce any bugs in your master branch (keep those in your feature branches). With master green you can always deploy to production without fear.
Yes you can. Travis-CI is an automated, hosted build service that we'll be using.
Requirements
- a public repository
- .travis.yml file (build configuration)
- tests (duh)
Head over to travis-ci.org and click the login button in the upper right. We'll do the other details together.
language: ruby
rvm:
- 1.9.3
env:
- DB=postgresql
script:
- bundle exec rake db:test:prepare
- bundle exec rake spec
before_script:
- bundle exec rake db:create RAILS_ENV=test
bundler_args: --binstubs=./bundler_stubs