Running Two Very Different Travis Builds

two-travis-builds.md

I have a project that's been happily chugging along on Travis for a while. Its .travis.yml looks something like

script:
  - node_modules/ember-cli/bin/ember test

I wanted to add a second parallel build that did something very different. I didn't want to run ember test with a different Ember version or some other flag. I wanted to run a completely different command. Specifically, I wanted to run LicenseFinder's audit.

Travis has great docs on customizing parallel builds, but nothing describes how to do two completely different commands.

I poked at Bash for a while and finally came up with

env:
  - TEST_COMMAND="node_modules/ember-cli/bin/ember test"
  - TEST_COMMAND="bundle exec license_finder"

script:
  - (eval "$TEST_COMMAND")

The eval inherits the current shell's environment, and the (...) wrapping creates a sub-shell to isolate this shell from the effects of TEST_COMMAND.

Things That Didn't Work

This was my first attempt. I still don't quite understand why it doesn't work.

script:
  - $TEST_COMMAND

A second go breaks because I didn't wrap the argument to bash -c in quotes, meaning any arguments I tried to pass to ember got lost:

script:
  - bash -c $TEST_COMMAND

But even wrapping it in quotes failed because bash -c loses too much of the environment:

script:
  - bash -c "$TEST_COMMAND"

We at @phpbb we have a problem similar (we need different setup and test suite depending on the environment) and we solved it like @fh.
In the matrix we define a few envvar and we use them to select and configure our scripts.
This way we can do whatever we want and run exactly what we want in each configuration.

https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb/blob/3.1.x/.travis.yml

I think I'm going to end up using this, but isn't this a terrible kludge? Anything on the horizon to fix this?