Setup Travis CI for Rust Diesel project

Rust is supported on Travis CI, there are three main channels of Rust you can use: stable, beta and nightly. You can just follow their instruction to get your Rust project build smoothly.

But when it come to diesel.rs, it will be a bit tricky.

The reason is, in order to build a diesel-based project, you will need to have:

• A database on your build machine
• A .env file with a configuration to connect to that database
• diesel-cli installed to run migration

So, it will require some more configuration.

Let's create a .travis.yml file in your project's root folder.

Step 1: Rust version

You can select any version of Rust in your Travis CI, put this to your config file:

language: rust
rust:
  - nightly
  // or
  - 1.22.0
  // or
  - stable

Step 2: PostgreSQL (or what ever database you use)

Next, we need to add PostgreSQL as an extra service:

services:
  - postgresql

If you're using a different database, just change it. For the complete list of supported database, please take a look at this document.

Step 3: Init your database and migration

Now we need to do a lot of things, create a databse, install diesel-cli, create a database and run migration, let create a before_script section:

before_script:
  - psql -c 'create database build_db;' -U postgres
  - echo "DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres@localhost/build_db" > .env
  - cargo install diesel_cli --no-default-features --features=postgres
  - diesel migration run

Step 4: Build and Test

Finally, build and test your project with cargo:

script:
  - cargo build --verbose --all
  - cargo test --verbose --all

That's all you need!

If you are too lazy to follow the four steps, this is a gist for you.

P/S: It's worth to mention that due to a lot of cargo run, the build time is so freaking slow, with the above gist, my project took approximately 8 to 9 mins per build.

You might want to add some caching for cargo in your .travis.yml:

cache: cargo

See more about dependencies caching here.