Using Sauce Labs with Travis CI

Travis CI integrates with Sauce Labs, a browser and mobile testing platform. It integrates well with Selenium, for instance.

The integration automatically sets up a tunnel required to get started testing with it. For that purpose, it uses Sauce Connect.

Note that due to security restrictions, the Sauce Labs addon is not available on pull request builds unless you use the JWT Addon.

Setting up Sauce Connect #

Sauce Connect securely proxies browser traffic between Sauce Labs’ cloud-based VMs and your local servers. Sauce Connect uses ports 443 and 80 for communication with the Sauce Labs cloud. If you’re using Sauce Labs for your Selenium tests, this makes connecting to your web server a lot easier.

First, sign up with Sauce Labs if you haven’t already (it’s free for Open Source projects), and get your access key from your account page. Once you have that, add this to your .travis.yml file:

addons:
  sauce_connect:
    username: "Your Sauce Labs username"
    access_key: "Your Sauce Labs access key"

If you don’t want your access key publicly available in your repository, you can encrypt it with travis encrypt "your-access-key" (see Encryption Keys for more information on encryption), and add the pull request safe secure (See JWT Addon. string as such:

addons:
  sauce_connect:
    username: "Your Sauce Labs username"
  jwt:
    secure: "The secure string output by `travis encrypt SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY=Your Sauce Labs access key`"

You can also add the username and access_key as environment variables if you name them SAUCE_USERNAME and SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY, respectively. In that case, all you need to add to your .travis.yml file is this:

addons:
  sauce_connect: true

To allow multiple tunnels to be open simultaneously, Travis CI opens a Sauce Connect Tunnel Pool. Make sure you are sending the TRAVIS_JOB_NUMBER environment variable when you are opening the connection to Sauce Labs’ selenium grid, as the desired tunnel-name capability, or it will not be able to connect to the server running on the VM.

How this looks will depend on the client library you’re using, in Ruby’s selenium-webdriver bindings:

caps = Selenium::WebDriver::Remote::Capabilities.firefox({
  'tunnel-name' => ENV['TRAVIS_JOB_NUMBER']
})
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for(:remote, {
  url: 'http://username:access_key@ondemand.saucelabs.com/wd/hub',
  desired_capabilities: caps
})

Additional options #

Sometimes you may need to pass additional options to Sauce Connect. Currently supported parameters are

  • direct_domains
  • no_ssl_bump_domains
  • tunnel_domains

As an example, you may need --direct-domains option in case some HTTPS domains fail to work with Sauce Connect:

addons:
  sauce_connect:
    username: "Your Sauce Labs username"
    direct_domains: example.org,*.foobar.com
  jwt:
    secure: "The secure string output by `travis encrypt SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY=Your Sauce Labs access key`"

Build Config Reference #

You can find more information on the build config format for Sauce Connect in our Travis CI Build Config Reference.