I’m working on a Travis CI build that spins up a complex multi-service environment using Docker Compose. The goal is to run integration tests that require multiple containers to be networked together — including a custom app container, a PostgreSQL service, Redis, and a local S3-compatible mock (like MinIO).
My setup uses Docker Compose to define all of these containers, and I rely on Travis CI’s docker
service to run them within the build. I’m launching the services during the before_install
phase with docker-compose up -d
, and I’ve added healthcheck
definitions to each service so that Travis CI doesn’t begin testing until the services are fully healthy. However, I’m noticing that Travis sometimes proceeds before services like PostgreSQL or MinIO are truly ready, resulting in sporadic test failures.
In addition to reliability issues, I’m also struggling with Docker layer caching. Despite attempting to cache $HOME/.docker
and using docker save
/ docker load
to persist custom images, my builds still take over 10 minutes because images appear to be rebuilt every time. I’ve experimented with Travis’ native caching and also tried tagging and reloading images within the CI job itself, but it doesn’t seem to help much.
There’s also a networking challenge. Occasionally, containers cannot resolve each other by name. For example, the app container sometimes fails to connect to minio:9000
, even though all services are defined in the same docker-compose.yml
and should be on the same network. These issues appear intermittently, which makes them especially difficult to diagnose.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has successfully built a Docker Compose-based integration environment on Travis CI. Any tips on caching strategies, service readiness, or job structure improvements would be greatly appreciated. Let me know if you’d like me to share a link to the public GitHub repository for more context.