Et Tu Brutè? Use Travis CI for FOSS no more.
Published: 2020-11-13 18:50:03

---
title: Et Tu Brutè? Use Travis CI for FOSS no more.
published: true
date: 2020-11-13 00:00:00 UTC
tags: 
canonical_url: https://webknjaz.me/prose/et-tu-brute-use-travis-ci-for-foss-no-more/
---

Something sadly<sup id="fnref-kill-foss-sentiment"><a href="#fn-kill-foss-sentiment">1</a></sup> expected has happened at the beginning of the last week. Travis CI — a pioneer in the field that brought automated testing seamlessly integrated with GitHub to ~~masses~~ many open-source projects on scale — announced that they are migrating all of the public projects that previously got the service for free to a trial plan with a limited amount of toy credits to use<sup id="fnref-anti-foss"><a href="#fn-anti-foss">2</a></sup>.

Ever since they were acquired<sup id="fnref-sinking-idera"><a href="#fn-sinking-idera">3</a></sup> by a company with a rather shady past<sup id="fnref-shady-idera"><a href="#fn-shady-idera">4</a></sup>, Travis CI kept going down this path. They've been shrinking the resources again and again over the past few years and it seems this sort of outcome was inevitable, expecially once they've suddenly layed off a lot of senior engineers<sup id="fnref-layoff-idera"><a href="#fn-layoff-idera">5</a></sup>.

Of course, they've made a rather pathetic attempt to assure everyone that they'll continue to support open source. But who are they kidding? I bet most of the maintainers have better things to do then go begging support for a bunch of free credits every now and then just to keep things runing. Folks keep underestimating the [FOSS maintenance effort](https://twitter.com/di_codes/status/1326952200413786112) and it even seems like projects using [Tidelift](https://tidelift.com/subscription/pkg/pypi-cheroot?utm_source=pypi-cheroot&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=blog) may be inelligible<sup id="fnref-travis-uncommercial-foss"><a href="#fn-travis-uncommercial-foss">6</a></sup>.

### Now What?

Even before the acquisition there's been signs that Travis CI wasn't doing well. There are a lot of articles on setting up other CIs like [Azure Pipelines](https://hynek.me/articles/simple-python-azure-pipelines/) or [GitHub Actions CI/CD Workflows](https://hynek.me/articles/python-github-actions/). Most of the alternative options provide a comparable experience but may have slightly different ways of being set up. There are also even more powerful CIs like[Zuul](https://zuul-ci.org) that are available to significant FOSS projects.

### So can we dump Travis CI yet?

Yes, we totally can do that! Should we, though? I'm personally planning to stop advocating for using Travis CI if it's not necessary for a given project. Back in the day, I even contributed a GitHub Pages deployment provider into their dpl project so I feel a little nostalgic... I used to give linting CI set up tasks to my mentees based on Travis. But now, I don't want to advertise a FOSS-unfriendly lock-in so I'll switch to [GitHub Actions CI/CD Workflows](https://hynek.me/articles/python-github-actions/).

There's one case when I may need to consider using Travis CI additionally to other systems — there are cases when I'd want to run tests in environments (architectures) that none of the other CIs provide. But this will be decided on per-project basis.

Huh. I guess that's all I've been wanting to write. 🖖

* * *

1. A lot of people got upset because of this [Travis CI fuckup](https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1323223738247192576).[↩](#fnref-kill-foss-sentiment)

2. [Travis gave everyone 10K credits](https://blog.travis-ci.com/2020-11-02-travis-ci-new-billing) and suggested that people would need to switch to a paid plan after that.[↩](#fnref-anti-foss)

3. Travis [announced the acquisition by Idera](https://blog.travis-ci.com/2019-01-23-travis-ci-joins-idera-inc) on Jan 23, 2019.[↩](#fnref-sinking-idera)

4. Some people on HN seem to have previous experience with [Idera ruining their acquired businesses](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978346). Also, they've announced all sorts of commitments like keeping the [Travis Foundation](https://foundation.travis-ci.org) alive and now, almost two years in, that domain is dead and googling doesn't even find any mentions of it.[↩](#fnref-shady-idera)

5. Idera [removed many essensial employees](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19218036) without a warning and folk on Twitter call this the [last nail](https://twitter.com/kylemh_/status/1323494924306710528) in the coffin.[↩](#fnref-layoff-idera)

6. It's not yet clear but people on Twitter speculate that [Tidelift-baked FOSS projects may not get free credits](https://twitter.com/hugovk/status/1326935425903185920)[↩](#fnref-travis-uncommercial-foss)