10 March 2014
Follow @micheletitoloTL;DR Both the Guides and Blog now auto-deploy when we push to master.
We are always looking for ways to make contributing to CocoaPods easier, and a quick win for us is auto-deploying the guides and blog. Now any member of the team can accept a PR, and Travis will deploy the changes within minutes.
Scripts
Travis needs instructions on how to build this code. While you can add all of those commands to the Travis config directly, that is difficult to debug and removes the ability to manually setup and deploy.
Every CocoaPods repository has a rake bootstrap command to ensure the environment is setup, and every site has a rake deploy command. Taking the time to set these up in the past made it incredibly easy to integrate this process with Travis.
Pushing to Github Pages with Travis
Setting up these two repositories to push to Github pages was pretty trivial, once I figured out the correct steps.
1. Travis needs to be a user
Since Travis needs to push to Github, it needs a user. Pick or create a user, and get a Personal Access Token. This token is generated in Account Settings on Github. We chose to use the CocoaPods Bot account.
2. Authenticate with that user
In order to identify as this user, Travis needs credentials. I chose to encrypt the user information using the travis gem. I ran the command below from within the project directory with the add flag so it automatically adds the encrypted output to the .travis.yml
travis encrypt 'GIT_NAME="Account Name" [email protected] GH_TOKEN=SOMEREALLYLONGSTRING' --add
3. Setup and Deploy
Travis build on a completely fresh checkout, so setting up the environment is key. Thankfully both sites had the rake bootstrap command, so I was able to reuse that.
The deploy script turned out to be the tricky part. The important step here is to make sure the deploy script relies upon the git remote that's setup. All of our static sites have a rake deploy command, which I modified to remove the hardcoding of the remote.
4. travis.yml
Configure git settings in .travis.yml. By default, Travis doesn't have a user, so you should set the user.email and user.name to push with. These should match the credentials you encrypted with the token.
install:
- git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
- git config --global user.name "CocoaPods Bot"
5. Updating the remote
In this setup, Travis doesn't have ssh access to the repository. Change the git remote to point to https with your token attached. The token is used to authenticate the push. Here's what the Blog setup looks like:
git remote set-url origin "https://${GH_TOKEN}@github.com/CocoaPods/blog.cocoapods.org.git"
6. Turn on Travis builds
This is done from Settings. Also, since this is a deploying build, make sure that you do not build when pull requests are made.
7. Commit and push your changes.
Hopefully everything will work. If not, you can make more changes, push, and wait for Travis to build.
The .travis.yml
language: ruby
branches:
only:
- master
rvm:
- 2.0.0
install:
- git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
- git config --global user.name "CocoaPods Bot"
- rake bootstrap
script:
- git remote set-url origin "https://${GH_TOKEN}@github.com/CocoaPods/blog.cocoapods.org.git"
- rake deploy
env:
global:
secure: XXXX
In Conclusion
So that's how we have our Travis deploys setup now. CocoaPods is a community effort, so lowering the barrier for contributions has been one of our goals. This new setup does just that. Edit away!
