Customizing Travis CI Enterprise Build Images

With Travis CI Enterprise, you can configure your build images to suit your development process and improve the build environment and performance.

Customizing Build Images #

After pulling the build images from quay.io either through installation or manually, make sure they’ve been re-tagged to travis:[language]. Once this configuration is in place, you can fully customize these images according to your needs.

Note that you’ll need to re-apply your customizations after upgrading build images from quay.io.

Ubuntu Trusty build environments #

For Ubuntu Trusty build environments we ship three Docker images in total. Depending on the user’s .travis.yml configuration, we will pick the corresponding image to run the build.

We’re shipping the same Docker build images as we use on travis-ci.com. The base image, connie contains all databases and frameworks preinstalled, such as postgresql, mysql, memcached, pyenv, rvm, gimme. Though there are no interpreters available. Based on connie there is garnet, which adds the following programming languages:

• Ruby
• Node.js
• Go
• PHP
• Python
• Java / JVM

The third image, amethyst, additionally ships with Android, Erlang, Haskell and Perl preinstalled.

Any modification to one of these images will be available for other languages as well.

Ubuntu Precise build environments (deprecated) #

In the Ubuntu Precise environment we’re shipping a separate Docker image for each language we support. There we support the same languages as in our current Trusty environment.

How to customize #

The process is to:

• start a Docker container based on one of the default build images travis:[language],
• run your customizations inside that container, and
• commit the container to a Docker image with the original travis:language name (tag).

For example, in order to install a particular Ruby version which is not available on the default travis:ruby image, and make it persistent, you can run:

      docker -H tcp://0.0.0.0:4243 run -it --name travis_ruby travis:ruby su travis -l -c 'rvm install [version]'
      docker -H tcp://0.0.0.0:4243 commit travis_ruby travis:ruby
      docker -H tcp://0.0.0.0:4243 rm travis_ruby

Enabling Docker Builds #

Worker machine configuration #

To build docker images on Travis CI Enterprise, add the following to /etc/default/travis-worker on all your Workers:

    export TRAVIS_WORKER_DOCKER_PRIVILEGED="true"

Configuration for Docker Builds in Trusty Build Environments #

With Trusty build images a few additional steps are required. Since docker-ce can’t run on its own inside another Docker container, it’ll connect to the Host’s Docker daemon to execute the respective commands.

We accomplish this by adding another configuration option to /etc/default/travis-worker:

export TRAVIS_WORKER_DOCKER_BINDS='/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock'

With this option we tell travis-worker to make the host’s Docker socket available inside the build containers.

Please restart travis-worker after you have saved the configuration file.

Restart travis-worker #

To restart travis-worker, you can find the instructions here.

Updates to your .travis.yml files #

Trusty build containers #

Once the worker machine is configured properly, you can use Docker as usual in your build.

Please note that on an Enterprise installation you don’t need to add services: docker to the .travis.yml.

Since you’re using the host’s Docker daemon, all images and containers used in your build are stored on the host machine. To free up disk space, we recommend using the --rm flag when you use Docker run in your build. In addition, customers will be required to periodically clear unused images generated by their builds i.e. executing docker rmi ... command or similar. To avoid race conditions when multiple builds start to remove containers and images at the same time, we recommend to clean them up manually on the machine directly while no build is running.

Precise build containers (legacy) #

Add the following to any .travis.yml files for repositories which would like to use Docker:

    install:
          - sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu:80 --recv-keys 58118E89F3A912897C070ADBF76221572C52609D
          - echo "deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo ubuntu-precise main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list
          - sudo apt-get update
          - sudo apt-get install docker-engine

For example, if you want to create a new repository and test out Docker support, you can create a .travis.yml file which looks like the following:

    install:
          - sudo apt-get update
          - sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates
          - sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys 58118E89F3A912897C070ADBF76221572C52609D
          - echo "deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo ubuntu-precise main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list
          - sudo apt-get update
          - sudo apt-get install docker-engine
          - sudo docker pull ubuntu

    script:
          - sudo docker run ubuntu date

Contact Enterprise Support #

To get in touch with us, please write a message to enterprise@travis-ci.com. If possible, please include as much of the following as you can:

• Description of the problem - what are you observing?
• Which steps did you try already?
• A support bundle (see table below on how to obtain it)
• Log files from all workers (They can be found at /var/log/upstart/travis-worker.log - please include as many as you can retrieve).
• If a build failed or errored, a text file of the build log

Since the announcement in Q3 2020, the most up to date version of Travis CI Enterprise is 3.x line. There are not any new releases for version 2.2 and the support patches has been limited since March 2021 as well. For existing users of Travis CI 2.x we strongly recommend upgrading to the latest Travis CI Enterprise 3.x.

Have you made any customizations to your setup? While we may be able to see some information (such as hostname, IaaS provider, and license expiration), there are many other things we cannot see which could lead to something not working. Therefore, we would like to ask you to also answer the questions below in your support request (if applicable):

• How many machines are you using / what is your Kubernetes cluster setup?
• Do you use configuration management tools (Chef, Puppet)?
• Which other services do interface with Travis CI Enterprise?
• Which Version Control system (VCS) do you use together with Travis CI Enterprise (e.g. github.com, GitHub Enterprise, or BitBucket Cloud)?
• If you are using GitHub Enterprise, which version of it?

We are looking forward to helping!