If you’ve ever tried to do browser testing against multiple browsers before, you know how much of a pain it can be. Recently we pushed two changes that should make browser testing a bit easier on Travis.

If you’re testing on Firefox, you may require a specific Firefox version. We preinstall a fairly recent version on our VMs, but if you require one that’s older we’ve added a config setting that will download and install a version of Firefox. If you want, say, Firefox 17.0, all you need to do is to add this to your .travis.yml file:

addons:
  firefox: "17.0"

This will download the Firefox 17.0 binaries from Mozilla and link the binary to /usr/local/bin/firefox. We download this straight from Mozilla’s servers, so every version back to 0.8 is available.

If you need to test against more than one version or multiple browsers, then the awesome people over at Sauce Labs may have just what you need. If you’re doing Selenium testing, they have infrastructure set up to help you spin up one of their many, many browsers. They even have mobile browsers to use. The best part? If your project is open source, their Open Sauce plan is completely free.

Part of their setup is called Sauce Connect, which sets up a tunnel from your server to their servers so they can access your webserver. We want testing to be as easy as possible, so we have added first-class support for Sauce Connect right in your .travis.yml config file. In order to enable Sauce Connect, all you need to add to your .travis.yml file is this:

addons:
  sauce_connect:
    username: your_username
    access_key: your_sauce_access_key

The username and access_key fields support encryption, so you don’t have to put them in your repository as plaintext. Read more about this in the addons docs.

This is available on both Pro and Org VMs today. Go try it out!