Until recently we’ve been handling issues with parsing .travis.yml files rather poorly. YAML is a finicky beast, and when there was a problem parsing it, we didn’t communicate that at all.

On top of that, when a project or a branch is missing, we’re still assuming the defaults and run commands focused on Ruby, which can be confusing as well.

To improve both scenarios, you will now see messages in your builds logs should we fail to parse your .travis.yml or should there be no .travis.yml available for the commit we’re currently building.

In case of a parsing issue we stop the build immediately and end it marked with an error.

We’re still improving on this front, but this at least gives a bit more transparency into why we run default commands, and we prevent your build from running with the defaults when there’s a problem with your .travis.yml.