Ci

I was writing internal documentation on how I set up automated language checking at Transloadit. Halfway through, I thought this could be useful to the rest of the world :earth_americas: as well, so I rewrote it in a more generic fashion. I'll attempt to first give a high-level overview of the problem, then I will drive all the way down to the low-level nuts & bolts of solving it. I hope you'll enjoy, here goes!

Despite testcases, syntax errors still find their way into our commits. - Maybe it was a change in that bash script that wasn't covered by tests. Too bad our deploys relied on it. - Maybe it was just a textual change and we didn't think it was necessary to run the associated code before pushing this upstream. Too bad we missed that quote. Whatever the reason, it's almost 2014 and we are still committing broken code. This needs to change because in the - Best case: Travis or Jenkins prevent those errors from hitting production and it's frustrating to go back and revert/redo that stuff. A waste of your time and state of mind, as you already moved onto other things. - Worst case: your error goes unnoticed and hits production. Git offers commit hooks to prevent bad code from entering the repository, but you have to install them on a local per-project basis. Chances are you have been too busy/lazy and never took the time/effort to whip up a commit hook that could deal with all your projects and programming languages. That holds true for me, however I recently had some free time and decided to invest it in cooking up ochtra. One Commit Hook To Rule All.

<img src="/static/images/posts/2012-11-20-installing-hubot-on-ubuntu-0.png" title="Hubot" alt="Hubot"/> We used to run Hubot on Heroko until it crashed, not sure what happened exactly but we didn't bother to bring it back due to more pressing issues within our company. Then I saw one of the most gorgeous presentations ever, Intergalactic Javascript Robots from Outer Space, and it got me excited to run a Hubot again.

If you've written a webapp and you want to ensure that critical parts such as the signup process stay working, the best would be to have an actual user go through that process every time you change your codebase. But since that's both tedious & expensive, the second best thing is to automate a chrome browser (webkit engine anyway) to do this for you, and upload screenshots if anything unexpected happens. Welcome to CasperJS!