Ever wondering why some tests passed locally but failed on Travis? Ever questioning how could I go about to debug why that failed test on remote Travis? Read on as I show you how

In one occassion, I had a failed Ruby test on Travis which infact passed on my local box. So I tried to put in debugger and see if Travis could let me drop into Irb or not. It turns out Travis hang for quite a while until timed out. So debug remotely doesn’t work.

Right, plan B then. I spent some time dig into Travis documentation and learned that Travis server provisioned new VM image for every test. So if I could get my hand on the VMs, I could replicate the same environment that Travis run the test locally. Sound rational, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, I could not find any traces nor URL where to download those VMs. Thanks to Josh at Travis, he sent me the URL to VMs.

Download VM

Travis VM are packaged Vagrant box.

You coud download VM here at:

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files.travis-ci.org/boxes/provisioned/travis-(box_name).box

in which (box_name) is the language you use, ruby, php, etc.

For my case, I was testing a Rails app, so I downloaded the ruby box:

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wget files.travis-ci.org/boxes/provisioned/travis-ruby.box

Please note that those files are large in size ~> 3GB

Install Vagrant

Head to http://vagrantup.com/ and download the package for your OS.

Install Virtualbox

Head to https://www.virtualbox.org/ and download the app for your OS.

Import the VM box

Once you have downloaded the VM box, the image can be imported to your system. In my case:

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$ vagrant box add travis-ruby travis-ruby.box

If imported successfully, you should be able to see travis-ruby in the box list with:

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$ vagrant box list

Bootstrap

Let’s get our box up so we could SSH and start playing around with it:

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$ vagrant init travis-ruby

A new Vargrantfile will be created for you in the current folder. We could bring the box up with:

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$ vagrant up

And now you can SSH into with:

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$ vagrant ssh

Once you are in the box terminal, we run the post-install script:

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$ sh ./postinstall.sh

This script install all essential packages like compilers, libraries.

Debug your test

Copy your application to this VM box via scp or git clone and debug the test like you debug it on your local box.