We’re super pleased to announce that Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04 images, dist: xenial, are now ready for a wider audience. Keep reading below to see how to use Xenial, what’s new in it, what’s changing from our Trusty environment and where to give feedback.

We know many of you have been eagerly waiting for this Travis CI build environment. To use Xenial, add the following to your .travis.yml:

dist: xenial

Given that we’re unifying our Linux build environment into a single infrastructure with different images, Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 is only available in our fully virtualized environment to which your Xenial builds will be automatically routed.

There are two important updates to notice in Xenial from our Trusty environment:

First, Services like MySQL or PostgreSQL are not started by default. To start any service, such as MySQL, add it to the services key in your config:

services:
- mysql

The second change relative to Trusty, is that third-party APT repositories are removed. While many are used during the Xenial image provisioning, they are all removed from the Xenial build image. With this, we aim to reduce risk of unrelated build failures in case a third party APT repository becomes unavailable. Also, updating the repository metadata with apt-get update will happen faster.

From now on, if your build relies on third-party repositories, you need to add them to your build config under the addons.apt key.

For example, to update redis-server using PPA, add ppa:chris-lea/redis-server to apt-get redis-tools and redis-server:

addons:
  apt:
    sources:
    - ppa:chris-lea/redis-server
    packages:
    - redis-tools
    - redis-server

A brief summary of what’s installed by default in our Xenial images:

• Docker 18.06
• docker-compose 1.23.1.
• Node.js 11.0.0 and 8.12.0 (w/ nvm)
• Python 2.7.15, 3.6.5, and 3.7.1.
• Ruby 2.4.5 and 2.5.3 (w/ rvm)
• Go 1.11.1 (w/ gimme)
• PHP 5.6, 7.1 and 7.2 (w/ phpenv)
• Java 10 and Java 11 (and common builds tools: gradle, maven)
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• MongoDB
• Redis

You can find the specific versions of what’s pre-installed in the Xenial Reference docs.

Following today’s release, we’ll incorporate your feedback for the Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 image on a weekly basis during the next two months so that bug fixes and any improvements get into the image as soon as possible.

After this period of weekly updates to Xenial, we’re expecting to generate a stable, tagged, Ubuntu Xenial version by mid-January 2019. We’ll make sure to let you know here and in our docs once it’s available.

If you are running an Enterprise installation and interested in trying this out, please reach out to enterprise@travis-ci.com to see how you can use the Xenial images in your setup.

If there’s anything you’d like to see improved or if you notice any bugs or inconsistencies, please let us know in the Community Forum: Xenial.

We look forward to hearing about your experiences while taking it for a spin!