Keep your dotfiles bug-free with Continuous Integration

Update: As of April 2020, I have switched over to GitHub Actions. Travis CI has become buggy and flaky over time and I got tired of trying to keep the builds green. My GitHub action scripts can be seen here.

Just like many software engineers, I maintain my config files for GNU/Linux and macOS in a git repository. Given that, I wrote a fair bit of them in interpreted code, notably, Bash, it is a bit hard to ensure that it is bug-free. The other problem I face is that packages on homebrew, the macOS package manager becomes obsolete and gets deleted from time to time.

I added CI testing on GitHub Actions to prevent these breakages and to ensure that my dotfiles are always in good shape for installation. The great thing about GitHub Actions is the generous free tier for open-source repositories. I used to use Travis CI, but then it degraded drastically in quality over time.

My current set of CI tests for dotfiles can be seen here

The tests look like this

Yaml

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# Only relevant snippets are being displayed
- name: Run setup dotfiles
  run: |
    set -eo pipefail
    export CI=1
    bash setup_dotfiles.sh # Test dotfile setup
- name: Run Setup new Mac machine script
  run: |
    set -eo pipefail
    export CI=1
    # Test Mac OS package installation
    bash setup/setup_new_mac_machine.sh
- name: Run _macos script
  run: |
    set -eo pipefail
    export CI=1
    sudo bash setup/_macos

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