Recently Travis added support for Objective-C and there for OS X and iOS projects for continuous integration testing. I gather that people have previously done this with self-hosted dedicated Jenkins machines but since Apple is so aggressive about dropping support for previous versions of the OS it seems like a pain to have to replace your build server every few years. Enter Travis, a great hosted continuous integration server that hosts a huge amount of open source projects. I figured with this new support I could host some of my smaller libraries just to set how well it worked. The initial setup process was a bit tedious but I eventually got it to work.

Assumtions:

• You have a test framework already integrated with your project (I like Specta/Expecta)
• You have your project on Github in a public repository. Travis offers a pro account if you'd rather

Steps

• Create a .travis.yml file in the root of your repository (leading dot is intentional). For many projects a file may just look like:

language: objective-c

By default Travis runs this script for Objective-C projects I was informed on Twitter that the current script that runs Objective-C projects is actually located here. It was originally created by Justin Spahr-Summers here. This script seems to run my projects without any issue, they just occasionally require more initial setup (we'll get to that).

• Enable your repository in Travis' settings. From your Travis profile page (after signing in with Github) you should see a list of your repositories, you may have to press 'Sync now', where you can switch on the repository you're planning on adding.

• Configure your project within Xcode. As I assumed above you already have a test target setup. You do have to do a few things in Xcode to make everything work correctly.

  1. Go to 'Manage Schemes' in Xcode.
  2. Check the 'Shared' box for the scheme that needs to be run.
  3. Click 'Edit…' in the bottom left and go to your build action.
  4. On the row of your Tests target check the box in the 'Run' column.

• At this point for a simple project or a project using CocoaPods you should be good to go. If Travis finds a Podfile in the root of your repository it automatically runs pod install to get your dependencies (from their docs). Otherwise there are a ton of configuration options for your .travis.yml depending on how your repo is setup.

For one of my projects I created a setup.sh file at the root of my repo that looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

git submodule update --init --recursive
echo "Setting up test frameworks..."
cd Example/Vendor/Specta; rake > /dev/null
cd ../Expecta; rake > /dev/null
echo "Done"
cd ../../../

This script which I run using the before_install: ./setup.sh option in my .travis.yml gets all my submodules, sets up Specta and Expecta and then goes back to the root directory for running. If you just have a few simple steps you can also have multiple before_install actions like:

before_install:
  - cd Example
  - make

You can read more about other Travis configuration options in their documentation.