Jenkins vs Travis-CI. Which one would you use for a Open Source project?

Travis-ci and Jenkins, while both are tools for continuous integration are very different.

Travis is a hosted service (free for open source) while you have to host, install and configure Jenkins.

Travis does not have jobs as in Jenkins. The commands to run to test the code are taken from a file named .travis.yml which sits along your project code. This makes it easy to have different test code per branch since each branch can have its own version of the .travis.yml file.

You can have a similar feature with Jenkins if you use one of the following plugins:

• Travis YML Plugin - warning: does not seem to be popular, probably not feature complete in comparison to the real Travis.
• Jervis - a modification of Jenkins to make it read create jobs from a .jervis.yml file found at the root of project code. If .jervis.yml does not exist, it will fall back to using .travis.yml file instead.

There are other hosted services you might also consider for continuous integration (non exhaustive list):

• Circle CI
• Wercker
• drone.io
• Gitlab-CI
• codeship
• shippable
• semaphore

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How to choose ?

You might want to stay with Jenkins because you are familiar with it or don't want to depend on 3rd party for your continuous integration system. Else I would drop Jenkins and go with one of the free hosted CI services as they save you a lot of trouble (host, install, configure, prepare jobs)

Depending on where your code repository is hosted I would make the following choices:

• in-house → Jenkins or gitlab-ci
• Github.com → Travis-CI

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To setup Travis-CI on a github project, all you have to do is:

• add a .travis.yml file at the root of your project
• create an account at travis-ci.com and activate your project

The features you get are:

• Travis will run your tests for every push made on your repo
• Travis will run your tests on every pull request contributors will make

I worked on both Travis and Jenkins: I will list down some of the features of both:

Setup CI for a project

Travis comes in first place. It's very easy to setup. Takes less than a minute to setup with GitHub.

1. Login to GitHub
2. Create Web Hook for Travis.
3. Return to Travis, and login with your GitHub credentials
4. Sync your GitHub repo and enable Push and Pull requests.

Jenkins:

1. Create an Environment (Master Jenkins)
2. Create web hooks
3. Configure each job (takes time compare to Travis)

Re-running builds

Travis: Anyone with write access on GitHub can re-run the build by clicking on `restart build

Jenkins: Re-run builds based on a phrase. You provide phrase text in PR/commit description, like reverify jenkins.

Controlling environment

Travis: Travis provides hosted environment. It installs required software for every build. It’s a time-consuming process.

Jenkins: One-time setup. Installs all required software on a node/slave machine, and then builds/tests on a pre-installed environment.

Build Logs:

Travis: Supports build logs to place in Amazon S3.

Jenkins: Easy to setup with build artifacts plugin.

I would suggest Travis for Open source project. It's just simple to configure and use.

Simple steps to setup:

1. Should have GITHUB account and register in Travis CI website using your GITHUB account.
2. Add .travis.yml file in root of your project. Add Travis as service in your repository settings page.

Now every time you commit into your repository Travis will build your project. You can follow simple steps to get started with Travis CI.