Running nginx on containerised travis-CI pt 2

2016-03-28

There are several guides out there about how to setup nginx on travis-CI but I still found it to be a challenge, especially finding a modern one that works with the containerized builds. I was frustrated that things like SimpleHTTPServer from python and http-server from npm did not have fully enough features to run our app either (a complex "static-site generator" type thing you might say), and I was also too lazy to setup "sauce labs" (which I have not used, but presume has some better ability to run functional/browser tests).

Essentially, the problem with running nginx under the containerized build is that it "likes to be sudo", with many logfiles by default going to different places that only sudo has access to.

This link is probably the most similar to the technique I use here, but it is now gone (?) and must be accessed through the internet archive!

http://www.doublesignal.com/running-nginx-on-containerised-travis-ci

My technique is very similar, however I use an extra trick to set the file root to the current directory (instead of /tmp/nowhere as in the link) by using "envsubst" to replace variables in the nginx config file.

Without further ado, the .travis.yml can look like this

sudo: false
addons:
  apt:
    packages:
      - nginx
install:
  - cat tests/travis.conf | envsubst > tests/travis-envsubst.conf
  - nginx -c `pwd`/tests/travis-envsubst.conf
script:
  - wget http://localhost:9000/yourfiles

Then your nginx config file can look like this

    worker_processes 10;
    pid /tmp/nginx.pid;

    error_log /tmp/error.log;

    events {
        worker_connections 768;
    }

    http {
        client_body_temp_path /tmp/nginx_client_body;
        fastcgi_temp_path     /tmp/nginx_fastcgi_temp;
        proxy_temp_path       /tmp/nginx_proxy_temp;
        scgi_temp_path        /tmp/nginx_scgi_temp;
        uwsgi_temp_path       /tmp/nginx_uwsgi_temp;

        server {
            listen 9000 default_server;

            server_name localhost;
            location / {
                root $TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR;
                index  index.html index.htm;
            }
            error_log /tmp/error.log;
            access_log /tmp/access.log;
        }
    }

Then, when travis-CI is run, it uses envsubst to replace $TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR in the tests/travis.conf file, and then boots up nginx