Reproducing Travis CI builds

Posted on 2015-03-28

I’m currently writing my bachelor thesis and one of the tools I’m using is Travis CI. In my opinion, continuous integration is great even for small projects like my thesis. Getting bugged over broken tests forces me to eventually fix them. (And setting up Travis CI can be a good exercise in procrastination.)

I had some problems. The default build environment is Ubuntu Precise (12.04) and it has a slightly old version GCC, which doesn’t support C11 (or C++11). I also managed to get the option order for GCC wrong for some time, which broke my build in a way I couldn’t reproduce on my own machine.

Fortunately, Travis CI provides specifications of their build environment on their GitHub (travis-ci/travis-cookbooks). To boot your own Travis VM, just install vagrant, and:

mkdir travis-build
cd travis-build

# Grab the Vagrantfile from GitHub
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/travis-ci/travis-cookbooks/master/Vagrantfile

# Boot up a machine (64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 Precise, in this case)
vagrant up precise64

# Great success!
vagrant ssh