Automating Testing using Travis CI

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Alright, something that every developer loves testing! But who has time for all those ***** tests? That’s where Travis CI comes in to save the day (or night)!

To kick things off what is Travis CI? It’s an open-source continuous integration tool that automatically builds and tests code changes on every commit or pull request. This means no more manually running tests, waiting for them to finish, and then checking the results. With Travis CI, you can sit back, relax, and let it do all the heavy lifting!

Now, let’s get started with setting up our project. First, create a new GitHub repository or use an existing one. Then, add your code to this repo (duh). Next, head over to Travis CI and sign in using your GitHub account. Once you’re signed in, click on “Add” next to the repositories section.

Select the repository that you just created or added your code to. Then, click on “More options”. This will give us some extra settings for our project. We can customize these settings based on our needs (or lack thereof). For example, we could set up a build matrix with different operating systems and Python versions. But let’s keep it simple for now.

Now that we have our basic setup complete, let’s add some tests to our project. We’ll use the popular testing framework unittest (because why not?). Create a new file called `tests.py` in your repository and add some test cases:

# Import the necessary modules
import unittest # Importing the unittest module for testing
from my_module import my_function # Importing the my_function function from my_module

# Create a test class
class TestMyFunction(unittest.TestCase): # Creating a test class that inherits from the TestCase class in the unittest module
    # Define a test method
    def test_my_function(self): # Defining a test method with the self parameter
        result = my_function() # Calling the my_function function and assigning the result to the variable "result"
        self.assertEqual(result, 42) # Using the assertEqual method to check if the result is equal to 42

# Run the tests if the script is executed directly
if __name__ == '__main__': # Checking if the script is being executed directly
    unittest.main() # Running the tests using the main method from the unittest module

In this example, we’re testing a function called `my_function`. We expect the output to be 42 (because that’s what it always returns). If you have more test cases or functions, just add them to your tests file.

Now let’s configure Travis CI to run our tests automatically on every commit or pull request. To do this, we need to create a `.travis.yml` file in the root of our repository. This is where we can specify all sorts of settings for our project. Here’s an example:

# This script specifies the language and testing command for Travis CI to run on every commit or pull request.

# Language setting
language: python

# Testing command
script: python tests/tests.py

In this configuration, we’re telling Travis CI that we want to use Python as the language and run our test script (which is `python tests/tests.py`) on every commit or pull request.

That’s it! Now whenever you push a new commit or create a pull request, Travis CI will automatically build and test your code. If everything passes, you’ll get a green checkmark in GitHub. If something fails, you’ll get a red X (which is always fun).

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