Continuous Integration using Travis-CI

Continuous Integration is basically integrating your newest addition of code, or markup language, into the larger project and running a series of tests to make sure it behaves as expected. In the case of a sphinx project, the most important test is to lint the submitted reStructuredText to make sure it has correct syntax.

For linting purposes, the sphinx-build command allows you to specify a dummy builder that does syntax checks, but doesn’t write output.

You can also use -n to run the builder in “nit-picky mode”, which warns about all missing references, combined with -W to turn all warnings into errors. And finally, -T to show full traceback on exception to help debug failed build logs.

Not only can you configure Travis-CI to run on the master branch, but it also supports running integration tests on all pull requests before they are to be merged.

Travis-CI also integrates with GitHub so you can see the build status on each commit or PR and wether or not the build it triggered passed or failed.

Using PR #3 as an example, you can see it has a Details link to the latest build for that PR.