Environment Variables

A common way to customize the build process is to define environment variables, which can be accessed from any stage in your build process.

The best way to define an environment variable depends on what type of information it will contain, and when you need to change it:

• if it does not contain sensitive information and should be available to forks – add it to your .travis.yml
• if it does contain sensitive information, and is the same for all branches – encrypt it and add it to your .travis.yml
• if it does contain sensitive information, and might be different for different branches – add it to your Repository Settings

Define Public Variables #

Public variables defined in .travis.yml are tied to a certain commit. Changing them requires a new commit, restarting an old build uses the old values. They are also available automatically on forks of the repository.

Define variables in .travis.yml that:

• are needed for the build to run and that don’t contain sensitive data. For instance, a test suite for a Ruby application might require $RACK_ENV to be set to test.
• differ per branch.
• differ per job.

Define environment variables in your .travis.yml in the env key, quoting special characters such as asterisks (*). One build will be triggered for each line in the env array.

env:
  - DB=postgres
  - SH=bash
  - PACKAGE_VERSION="1.0.*"

If you define a variable with the same name in .travis.yml and in the Repository Settings, the one in .travis.yml takes precedence. If you define a variable in .travis.yml as both encrypted and unencrypted, the one defined later in the file takes precedence.

Variables’ values are passed to the generated build script verbatim. So make sure to escape any Bash special characters accordingly. In particular, if a value contains spaces, you need to put quotes around that value. E.g., a long phrase should be written as "a long phrase".

Define Multiple Variables per Item #

If you need to specify several environment variables for each build, put them all on the same line in the env array:

rvm:
  - 1.9.3
  - rbx-3
env:
  - FOO=foo BAR=bar
  - FOO=bar BAR=foo

this configuration triggers 4 individual builds:

1. Ruby 1.9.3 with FOO=foo and BAR=bar
2. Ruby 1.9.3 with FOO=bar and BAR=foo
3. Rubinius latest version (rbx-3) with FOO=foo and BAR=bar
4. Rubinius latest version (rbx-3) with FOO=bar and BAR=foo

Global Variables #

Sometimes you may want to use environment variables that are global to the matrix, i.e. they’re inserted into each matrix row. That may include keys, tokens, URIs or other data that is needed for every build. In such cases, instead of manually adding such keys to each env line in matrix, you can use global and jobs keys to differentiate between those two cases. For example:

env:
  global:
    - CAMPFIRE_TOKEN=abc123
    - TIMEOUT=1000
  jobs:
    - USE_NETWORK=true
    - USE_NETWORK=false

triggers builds with the following env rows:

USE_NETWORK=true CAMPFIRE_TOKEN=abc123 TIMEOUT=1000
USE_NETWORK=false CAMPFIRE_TOKEN=abc123 TIMEOUT=1000

Define Encrypted variables #

Before adding sensitive data such as API credentials to your .travis.yml you need to encrypt it. Encrypted variables are not available to untrusted builds such as pull requests coming from another repository.

A .travis.yml file containing encrypted variables looks like this:

env:
  global:
    - secure: 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
  jobs:
    -