Failing the build when the config validation contains errors

Travis CI Discussions & Feedback Feature Requests
1

When the build config validation contains errors, the build does not fail automatically. I think it should fail, because if the config contains errors, then we are not sure if the build is working as expected.

I’m part of Zeste de Savoir dev team and I just realized that our builds didn’t work properly during one month because Travis CI configuration changed and our .travis.yml didn’t work anymore.

Warnings and errors from build config validation

We didn’t see anything because our builds were green. You can see our build history here: https://travis-ci.org/github/zestedesavoir/zds-site/pull_requests. During one month, all builds had one job that runned for 3 minutes and showed green, compared to before where each build had five jobs that runned for about 8 minutes. This change occured between the 11th (job # 12346) and 18th February (job # 12349).

Anyway, I am fixing our build config and as far as I know it didn’t created any big issues for us, but we could have missed important feedback from our CI tests.

Best regards,
Situphen :slight_smile:

2

Hey @Situphen, thanks a lot for the report, and welcome to this forum!

We are gradually making our build config processing more strict, and provide more feedback on what might be wrong or should be fixed with build configs, while at the same time trying very hard not to break any existing builds.

I agree that ideally build requests that have error level messages should be rejected. At the moment this is not possible just so because we’d break builds for too many users. However we have plans to get there, step by step.

3

I understand completely! Maybe one step forward could be to make the build config validation more visible? Right now you need to go to the “View config” tag in order to check if there are any issues with the config, I don’t think anyone really take the time to do that for each build. This is what I propose as a first step:

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And the step after that could be to let the build pass but in a yellow/orange color and not green, so that it is clear something is wrong. :slight_smile: