Testing against Rubinius on Travis CI

05 December 2013
Follow @hazula

Background:

Fourteen (14) days ago, my Rubinius builds on Travis CI began erroring

Since, I can’t seem to find a write-up on the final state of affairs, I’ve written-up a summary of what I did, and how I got the tests reliably passing one (1) day ago.

Update 2014-02-10

The Rubinius 2.2.5 release now includes the standard library, and so, you no longer need a special :rbx group, only to specify rbx-2 in your travis.yml

Changelog:

Standard library gems ‘racc’, ‘minitest’, and ‘rubysl-test-unit’ are now pre-installed, in addition to json and the RubySL gems. (Brian Shirai)

Brian Shirai:

The ‘rbx-2’ is to limit testing on Rubinius 2.x since there will be other versions of Rubinius > 2.x soon. This part is unrelated to loading gems.

I’ve changed Rubinius code loading to avoid Bundler stripping pre-installed gems. I’ll be making a patch to Bundler so it will specifically consider pre-installed gems but in any case, Bundler will no longer prevent eg rubysl-securerandom or whatever from being loaded. I’m writing a Migrating from MRI guide that will cover this.

The now-recommended part of .travis.yml

rvm:
  - rbx-2

Original Fix:

Update travis.yml to specify rbx wherever you had rbx-whatever
Add a special travis gemfile or modify your gemfile to have some subset of

platforms :rbx do
  gem 'psych'                    # if using yaml
  gem 'rubysl', '~> 2.0'         # if using anything in the ruby standard library (meta-gem)

  gem 'minitest'                 # if using minitest
  gem 'rubysl-test-unit'         # if using test-unit with minitest 5.x https://github.com/rubysl/rubysl-test-unit/issues/1

  gem 'racc'                     # if using gems like ruby_parser or parser
  gem 'rubinius', '~> 2.0'       # if using any of rubinius-developer_tools and/or rubinius-build_tools

  gem 'rubinius-build_tools'     # if using any ast parsing, processing, or building
  gem 'rubinius-developer_tools' # if using any of coverage, debugger, profiler
end

Selected parts of my .travis.yml

language: ruby
gemfile:
  - gemfiles/Gemfile.travis
rvm:
  - 2.0.0
  - 1.9.3
  - jruby-19mode # JRuby in 1.9 mode
  - rbx
matrix:
  allow_failures:
    - rvm: rbx
cache: bundler

Notice the cache: bundler line? Since there are a lot of rubysl downloads, you can get a significant speed-up by telling Travis to cache them.

Selected parts of my Gemfile.travis

source 'https://rubygems.org'

# to use, from the app root run
# export BUNDLE_GEMFILE=$PWD/gemfiles/Gemfile.travis
# when done, unset BUNDLE_GEMFILE

platforms :rbx do
  gem 'racc'
  gem 'rubysl', '~> 2.0'
  gem 'psych'
end

eval_gemfile File.expand_path('../../Gemfile', __FILE__)

For completeness, the working commands that now run on travis are

rvm use rbx --install --binary --fuzzy
# rubinius 2.2.1 (2.1.0 3ed43137 2013-11-17 JI) [x86_64-linux-gnu]
rvm --version
# rvm 1.24.5 (latest-minor) by Wayne E. Seguin <wayneeseguin@gmail.com>, Michal Papis <mpapis@gmail.com> [https://rvm.io/]

Examples of rbx-specific Gemfile entries:

parser PR by @brixen:

I’m submitting a patch to Bundler after discussing with Andre that will enable Rubinius to designate rubysl as gems that are bundled with the distribution and Bundler will use that information while resolving.

This patch is a stop-gap measure and I can submit another PR to remove this once Bundler with that patch is released.

  platforms :rbx do
    gem 'rubysl', '~> 2.0'
    gem 'rubinius', '~> 2.0'
  end

rubinius:

  platform :rbx do
    gem "rubysl-rake", "~> 2.0"
    gem "rubysl-bundler", "~> 2.0"
    gem "rubysl-digest", "~> 2.0"
  end

rspec-rails

  -  require 'test/unit/assertions'
  +  begin
  +    require 'test/unit/assertions'
  +  rescue LoadError
  +    # work around for Rubinius not having a std std-lib
  +    require 'rubysl-test-unit' if defined?(RUBY_ENGINE) && RUBY_ENGINE == 'rbx'
  +    require 'test/unit/assertions'
  +  end

References:

Original content source: my comment on travis-ci issue