Travis CI and Rails Girls Summer of Code

Anika Lindtner's Gravatar Anika Lindtner,

Or: How to get from a dream to 19 scholarships in under 3 months.

A Summer of Code sponsoring 10 teams of students from all over the world working on Open Source projects full-time for three months. Sounds like a great idea? Why of course it does!

It’s the idea of Rails Girls Summer of Code: To support women who fell in love with programming, for instance at a Rails Girls Workshop and want to spend their summer coding full-time.

As Travis CI has always been deeply rooted in the community, supporting this project with all our hearts has been a no-brainer for us! We are old Rails Girls friends: We have been dedicated to their projects and ideas from the beginning. Josh, Konstantin and Sven have coached and talked on various workshops and have been especially involved in the Berlin Chapter. Sven even started the programming group ruby monsters, who have met every Monday for a year now. So for us a Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC) meant a Summer of Code with all our help.

What a crazy journey: raising $80,000 for a great cause in just about two weeks

The idea was born in March, at a meeting of the Berlin Chapter of Rails Girls coaches and organizers. Apparently whenever there is cake and coffee around magic starts happening ;)

Because everybody was so fascinated by the idea, Sven gave a lightning talk at a Rails Girls Berlin workshop at Wooga in late March and the idea immediately spread like wildfire. A whole new team formed, rolled up their sleeves and started to build a project out of an idea.

All those fantastic people who sponsor, help, coach, mentor and organize in their free time to build this project have done an unbelievable job!

Rails Girls Summer of Code now provides 10 sponsored teams and 8 volunteering Teams with the chance to dive deeper into coding and to get in touch with the amazing Open Source community. On top of that it gives the Rails Girls movement a longer-term goal of supporting women in technology and role models: Being the first Rails Girls students who make meaningful contributions to projects like Rails, Sinatra, Bundler, Spree… we think they’ll inspire many others with their stories.

In barely 2 months the dream of a Summer of Code had become reality:

Sven has been working on getting RGSoC off the ground and the whole Travis team contributed - Konstantin is even a Mentor of the Team Inchworms, who work on Sinatra and he is very impressed. I, Anika, joined the Travis CI team in June (whoa!) not only to help organize and run the Summer of Code but also to help out with Community Management and start making a wonderful new Travis dream come true. We have the crazy idea of supporting even more of these inspiring projects in the Open Source Community.

It’s now been two months since RGSoC started. Sixty days and it has already grown into a successful and widely beloved project! We couldn’t be more proud to be the main supporter and organizer of this initiative.

We love making awesome stuff happen and RGSoC was and is an excellent opportunity for us to support a wonderful mission.

To start to make Open Source even more awesome.

To start something big! We can’t reveal anything more yet, but we can say that this much:

Everybody - this is only THE BEGINNING!

Check out the teams’ activity streams, read the Rails Girls Summer of Code Blog or follow the project on Twitter.

Let Travis Push your RubyGems

Aaron Hill,

With Travis CI, you are able to automatically deploy your applications to Heroku, Nodejitsu, and Openshift.

Now, it’s also possible to release to RubyGems!

To set up continuous releasing to RubyGems, add the following lines to your .travis.yml:

deploy:
    provider: rubygems
    api_key: "YOUR-ENCRYPTED-API-KEY"

Or, if you’ve installed our handy command line tool, just use the setup command:

$ travis setup rubygems

However, releasing a gem is different than deploying an application. You probably don’t want every single build to be released. Instead, you can configure Travis CI to only deploy build with tags. This allows you to only release when you have a new version of your gem ready. Just add tags: true to the on section of your .travis.yml so it looks like this:

deploy:
    provider: rubygems
    api_key ...
    on:
        tags: true

An alternative approach is to let Travis CI push pre-releases and still do manual releases yourself. Look at what our deploy tool does internally for some inspiration.

And you’re all set!

This feature is immediately available to all our users including our Travis Pro customers.

Is your provider still missing?

If you’d like to see your provider supported on Travis CI, contact us or fork us on Github.

Abort the Mission: Cancel Running Builds

Mathias Meyer's Gravatar Mathias Meyer,

One of the biggest feature requests we’ve received over the past year (if not longer), and in particular as we’ve increased the runtime we allocate to your builds, is the ability to cancel a build.

Whether you accidentally broke something that you already know has been fixed in later commits, or you want to discard builds that are queued up but that you know will fail, or you have potentially failing builds holding up your build queue.

The great news we have for you today is that you can now cancel these builds.

This feature is available for jobs that are already running and for jobs that are queued up to run.

When you go to a specific job or a build (yup, you can even cancel all jobs of a single build in one go!), you’ll find a new option to cancel the build or the job.

You can do the same from the command line using our travis command line tool.

Needless to say that this feature is instantly available for open source projects and on https://travis-ci.com.

Happy shipping!