Native TravisCI Support for Common Lisp

Being used to Continuous Integration at work, I wanted to use it for my Lisp projects too. Looking around, the choice was pretty easy: TravisCI is a very nice platform developed by a company in Berlin, which offers free testing for open-source projects hosted at Github.

I saw that Luís Oliveira preceded me, so I followed the instructions at cl-travis and created a .travis.yml for all my libraries. Cl-travis contains a script that is run in the setup phase of the test and relies on CIM to provide a wrapper for common command line parameters of Lisp compilers. For the task at hand CIM works very well. Unfortunately, cl-travis has a few shortcomings:

• it hard-codes the implementation versions, so you can’t test on multiple versions, e.g. the one you use at work for internal projects, and the latest one for the benefit of open-source developers
• it has to install a few system packages required for running the Lisp implementations, which means it forces the test to use the old infrastructure based on VMs that are setup for every single test, taking a few minutes to boot. If we can avoid installing packages from within the .travis.yml file, we can use the new infrastructure based on light-weight containers which are spawn almost instantaneously
• it lacks integration with the TravisCI UI, e.g. to distinguish between the implementation used for a test run and proper build parameters

All that works, but there could be better because Travis allows adding community support for a language, for which there is an excellent documentation. In short, a group of at least three people are required to guarantee support, given that Travis generally updates the base image every three months. Extensions must be written in Ruby(for the core build infrastructure) and CoffeeScript(for the UI). I’m looking for help so if you’re interested I’ve opened a mailing list and a Github project.

Update: Fernando Boretti also blogged here about using cl-travis