Github and Travis CI

Continuous integration and collaboration

A recurring theme of this course has been the power of automation to improve your workflow. When properly applied, tools like ESLint and Jest greatly increase the chances that you’ll catch mistakes in your code long before that code has a chance to go into production. When you’re working as part of a team or maintaining an open-source project, how do you extend the power of automation to your collaborators?

One answer is good old-fashioned documentation: “Please run the tests before submitting a patch.” But that leaves the door open for human error. A better solution is to offload such quality control checks to a server, away from the personalized environments of developer machines. This technique has become known as continuous integration (CI).

Continuous integration takes the weight off of your shoulders as a project maintainer by allowing you to automate tasks you’d otherwise have to take on yourself. The CI server can tell potential contributors not only whether their patches pass the ...