I have been hearing a lot recently about continuous deployment especially in the context of building a lean startup, so I decided to try and get one of my projects running with continuous deployment.

Here’s what I learned today:

1. Travis CI is an open source tool for continuous integration and deployment.

2. There are several steps to setting up your project with Travis CI:

   • The getting started guide does a good job explaining the basics.

   • For my project, I needed to make a few customizations the biggest one was creating a test database that my test could use. Here is my .travis.yml:

              language: ruby
              rvm:
              - 2.0.0
              env:
              - DB=postresql
              script:
              - bundle exec rake db:test:prepare --trace
              - bundle exec rspec
              before_script:
              - psql -c 'create database my_app_test;' -U postgres 
     

3. Travis CI integrates nicely with Heroku, so that your code be deployed after a successful build. I was having some problems deploying using Anvil, so I switched to using git. Here is what I added to my .travis.yml for deploying to Heroku:

    deploy:
      provider: heroku
      api_key:
        secure: encrypted-key
      strategy: git
      app: epicodus-qa
      run: "rake db:migrate"