At the end of January we announced our fantastic partnership with Blue Box who now host and run our Linux VM infrastructure for all open source test runs.

This new setup not only allows us to offer users 64 bit Ubuntu 12.04 VMs with 3 gigs of memory, but it also gives us the flexibility to offer other great features over time like other OS’s and the choice of 32 or 64 bit archs.

Over the last month we have been running the new VM setup in parallel, with many customers providing invaluable feedback to us, helping us iron out any kinks they may of come across.

The new VM setup is based in Ashburn, in the heart of cloud country. Being closer to GitHub and services like RubyGems have helped improve builds times as well, for example, git clone is significantly faster and more reliable.

Today we are very happy to let all our Pro customers know that on the 29th of April we will be transitioning all private repositories to our private VM setup on Blue Box. This will start at 8am UTC/GMT and you should see no disruption of service or downtime. We’ll announce on twitter, as well as our status page, when we begin the transition and when it is completed.

If you would like to move your repository over to the new setup before the 29th, please email support@travis-ci.com and we will help move you over earlier.

There are three important changes which are good to be aware of as well as they may effect some builds.

1. All SSH connections to the VMs are now IPv6. This effects the current Cassandra setup, which we have a fix for and will be rolling out shortly.

2. FireFox has been updated to 19.0.2. This may effect your Selenium tests. We will be locking FireFox to 19.0.2 and providing an easy way to specify which FireFox you need in your test run, this will be announced in a blog post soon.

3. The use of ‘sudo’ should not be required for commands like ‘npm install’, ‘pip install’ or ‘gem install’. Removing the ‘sudo’ should make everything hum along nicely.

4. Declaration of services required by your application is now mandatory to reduce the overhead of things running by default. See the documentation for details.

If you experience any issues, please email us at support@travis-ci.com, or pop into our Campfire room, and we would be more than happy to help :)

Thanks to the awesome guys at Blue Box for working with us closely to make this possible!

Have a fantastic week,

Josh

Today we’re very thrilled to announce official support for Mac, iOS and RubyMotion applications and libraries on Travis CI.

To make this possible, we’ve partnered with the great folks at Sauce Labs, who are providing us with the infrastructure to run tests for your open source projects on the Mac platform.

Sauce Labs is a leading provider in cloud-based web application testing, and they’re sponsoring the Mac cloud that’s powering this new part of Travis CI. Thank you Sauce Labs, you’re awesome and we love you!

We’ve been beta-testing the new platform for a while now, and thanks to projects like CocoaPods and Sam Soffes’ SSKeychain we’re confident that you’ll enjoy this new and exciting part of Travis CI.

You can also check out the iOS app LetterpressPlayer and DPMeterView for more examples of projects running on the Mac platform.

For a RubyMotion example project, check out BubbleWrap.

How does it work?

Henrik Hodne has worked hard on making the integration as simple as possible, and did a great job on it too.

The build setup supports CocoaPods too, so if you have a Podfile in your project, Travis CI runs pod install automatically.

We run Justin Spahr-Summers’ objc-build-script by default, a nice wrapper around xcodebuild with better error handling, but you’re of course free to customize the build however you see fit!

How can I get started?

To get projects to run on our new Mac setup, we added a new language to our already pretty large mix of supported platforms.

Just add the following line to your iOS library, Mac application or RubyMotion project:

language: objective-c

Boom, you’re done!

For all the available options that customize the build and for the specifics of the Mac build environment, check the documentation and the example projects listed above!

Can I test the same project on Mac and Linux?

At this point, you can only run projects on either platform. We’re looking into supporting multiple platforms for the same project in the future.

When will this be available for private repositories?

Soon! Hit up support if you like to get in on the early beta test for that.

Happy Mac and iOS testing! We’re very excited about this new platform available for the open source community. Thank you Sauce Labs for providing us and the community with the infrastructure to enable more language and platform communities with free continuous integration!

Make sure to read the Sauce Labs blog post too!

To celebrate an awesome Rails Camp at Camp Kaitoke, and as a goodbye to the amazing city which I call home as I disappear overseas for another year, Travis will be holding an Open Office Hours at Lamason Brew Bar at the corner of Lombard & Bond St in Wellington, New Zealand.

Come share a fantastic coffee on us from 2pm tomorrow (Monday the 25th of March), meet some other awesome developers, and talk/code the afternoon away!

See you there!

Josh