Dan has been a long-time contributor to Travis CI, including not only our Go support, but also features within our cookbooks, as well as how we originally supported uploading artifacts after a build. We’re very honored to have him not only help us ship this feature, but also write this blog post, which I’m sure you’ll all enjoy. ~ Josh Kalderimis

If the builds you’re running on Travis CI produces artifacts, you’ll no doubt be thrilled to hear that we want to make saving these artifacts super easy for you.

The first supported tool for doing this was travis-artifacts, a handy gem-installable tool for shipping artifacts to Amazon S3. This was a great start, and solved the immediate need, but we knew we could do better.

Among the problems we hoped to address were the lengthy installation process of runtime dependencies and the lack of first-class support in one’s .travis.yml.

What we ended up building comes in two parts. First, there is a binary executable called artifacts. This binary may be downloaded and used directly by following the installation instructions.

In addition to this binary, an artifacts addon was tacked onto travis-build so that you can use it via your .travis.yml. More details are available in the docs, for example, all you need is to add the following to your .travis.yml:

addons:
  artifacts:
    bucket: my-special-bucket
    key:
      secure: SyaIXy6OKDaYiew+...5vgAldy3jkmKA=
    secret:
      secure: X19eaiiFZobD3uCk...X8cY+ohT8WkQ0=

And you should then see at the bottom of your log:

The above screenshot is from travis-build.

You can also set ARTIFACTS_KEY and ARTIFACTS_SECRET environment variables via the repository settings in order to keep your .travis.yml more slim, for example:

Setting such environment variables would reduce the valid addons configuration to the following:

addons:
  artifacts:
    bucket: my-special-bucket

By default, any files found using git ls-files -o within your repository directory will be uploaded to S3. If you want to upload a different set of files, you can specify these using the following config:

addons:
  artifacts:
    # ...
    paths:
    # arbitrary shell commands are supported, but the output should be
    # converted to a ':'-delimited string.
    - $(ls /var/log/*.log | tr "\n" ":")
    # singular paths work fine, too
    - $HOME/some/other/path.log

We have some great improvements in the works to make artifacts even better, but consider this the first of many.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think!