1) Installing a Web Server (e.g. Apache)¶

Your Travis server is an open canvas, upon which we computer-science artist may paint whatever software and configuration we want. So... let’s start with a web server!

before_script:
    - sudo apt-get update > /dev/null
    - sudo apt-get install -y --force-yes apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-curl php5-mysql php5-intl

2) Give yourself a VirtualHost¶

Since we’ll be making real HTTP requests back to our application, we’ll need a VirtualHost setup. One easy way to do this is to leverage Apache’s default VirtualHost, and use sed to stretch it to our needs:

before_script:
    # ...
    - sudo sed -i -e "s,/var/www,$(pwd)/web,g" /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
    - sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

And if you want to use a specific domain, you can set that up too: just be sure to do it before the apache restart call:

before_script:
    # ...
    - sudo sed -i -e "/DocumentRoot/i\ServerName knpu_qa.l" /etc/apache2/sites-available/default
    - echo "127.0.0.1 knpu_qa.l" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
    - sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

3) Composer! And all the other Stuff¶

Since Travis takes care of pulling your project into the server at the right version, we just need to download any dependencies we have. We’re using Composer and if you’re not, you’ll just need to tweak these commands to download your libraries dependencies, however that may be:

before_script:
    # ...

    # it may be useful to have the latest composer
    - composer self-update
    - composer install --dev --prefer-dist

The --prefer-dist part of Composer tells it to try to download zip archives, instead of cloning the repositories of your dependencies. We’ve chosen to do this because it’s a lot faster. However, we’ve found if your packages are hosted on GitHub, then you may see intermittent failures downloading the packages. There’s not much you can do here, but you may try --prefer-source, which will be slower, but potentially more reliable.

5) The Selenium Magic¶

And finally, the step you’ve been waiting for: how the heck do I run Selenium in this windowless machine? One solution that we’ve had success with is by leverage a utility called xvfb, or “X virtual framebuffer”. It’s actually exactly what we want: it does everything that X does... but without there actually being a window. Cool!

So let’s get it all installed:

before_script:
    # ...

    - "sh -e /etc/init.d/xvfb start"
    - "export DISPLAY=:99.0"
    - "wget http://selenium.googlecode.com/files/selenium-server-standalone-2.31.0.jar"
    - "java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.31.0.jar > /dev/null &"
    - sleep 5

The reason we need sleep 5 at the end is because the selenium server takes just a bit of time to initialize. If it’s not ready when Behat starts, then all related tests will fail for this build. Eek!

If you’re curious about any more of this, check out the GUI & Headless browser testing on travis-ci.org by the Travis folks.

- "wget http://chromedriver.googlecode.com/files/chromedriver_linux32_23.0.1240.0.zip && unzip chromedriver_linux32_23.0.1240.0.zip && sudo mv chromedriver /usr/bin"

GitHub API Rate Limit¶

If you have a lot of dependencies, you may eventually see this awesome error in your Travis output:

Could not fetch https://api.github.com/repos/Behat/MinkGoutteDriver/zipball/v1.0.7, enter your GitHub credentials to go over the API rate limit

No worries! To fix this, you can use your own account to get a token that your Travis build can use to get around this. We have this working here at KnpUniversity.com, and we stole the whole idea from this blog: Creating and Using a Github OAuth Token With Travis And Composer.

The end-result is a .travis.composer.config.json file that looks like this:

{
   "config":{
      "github-oauth":{
         "github.com":"5675git-yer-own-key9854abc"
      }
   }
}

and a new entry in .travis.yml before updating your composer dependencies:

before_script:
    # ...

    - "mkdir -p ~/.composer"
    - cp .travis.composer.config.json ~/.composer/config.json