Automated unit-testing for Haxe project using Travis-CI

Warning: This post is out-dated, see updated post here!

What is Travis-CI?

Travis-CI is “a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community”. It is tightly integrated with Github, once we enabled its commit hook, whenever there is a new commit, or a pull request, on any branch, it will automatically build and run the unit test and notify us any problem respecting to certain commits.

Why use it?

It gives us an extra level of safety, which safety is what we Haxe users love, after all that’s one of the reasons to use a strictly typed language over a dynamic one. Travis-CI’s unit test on pull request is particularly useful, which we can instantly identify on the Github pull request page any incoming changes that breaks our specification.

And did I mention this great hosted service is in fact free for open source projects?

How to use it?

All we have to do is to toggle the repo on in the Travis-CI accounts control panel, and then commit a .travis.yml in the root directory.

Here is an example .travis.yml that test C++, Neko and PHP targets:

# The first thing is to tell which VM environment we want the test to be run on.
# It dosen't quite matter for Haxe, just choose one of the targets our project support (e.g. PHP),
# and than apt-get install the others (e.g. Neko, C++).
# For more info, see http://about.travis-ci.org/docs/user/ci-environment/
language: php

# Install Haxe before running the test.
before_script:
  - sudo apt-get update                                # run update before installing anything
  - sudo apt-get install python-software-properties -y # for the next command
  - sudo add-apt-repository ppa:eyecreate/haxe -y      # add the ubuntu ppa that contains haxe
  - sudo apt-get update                                # pull info from ppa
  - sudo apt-get install haxe -y                       # install haxe (and neko)
  - sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib g++-multilib -y  # VM is 64bit but hxcpp builds 32bit
  - mkdir ~/haxelib                                    # create a folder for installing haxelib
  - haxelib setup ~/haxelib
  - haxelib install hxcpp                              # install hxcpp to test C++ target
  - mkdir bin                                          # create an output folder if needed

# Run the test!
script:
  - haxe travis.hxml

Note that at the time of writing, Travis-CI is running 64bit Ubuntu 12.4 VMs, and the PPA we used above will install Haxe 3.0RC and Neko 2.0.

Every command specified in the “script” section is actual test and should exit with code 0 if it pass or non-0 if fail. The above example simply try to compile the project. We can specify subsequent command to run a Haxe written test case, which we can use Sys.exit(allPass ? 0 : 1) to properly inform the test result.

Finally, we can check the repo page on Travis-CI for the test result. By default, if the test failed, an email will be sent to the commit author and the committer.

Existing Haxe project using Travis-CI

Some Haxe projects have been using the Travis-CI service for some time, for example flambe, HaxePunk and Ash-HaXe. We will soon re-enabled the TravisCI test of NME too! Hope it will help Haxe to become more solid every day, every commit ;)

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