Custom Cron Job Interval in Travis CI

Problem:

Cron job interval in Travis CI only allows daily, weekly and monthly. There’s no option to run a cron job that runs multiple times in a day. In this tutorial, I will show you how to have a custom cron job interval using Node.js

Solution:

Travis CI has an api to trigger builds with a POST request. What if I could utilize this by creating a cron job in node.js and call this api with my custom interval?

To get your API authentication token, go to user settings https://travis-ci.com/account/preferences

According to the docs, the request url should be like this

https://api.travis-ci.com/repo/travis-ci%2Ftravis-core/requests

where travis-ci is the owner and travis-core is the repository name.

Let’s say my repository name is foo. My url should be like this

https://api.travis-ci.com/repo/brijmcq%2Ffoo/requests

With that out of the way, let’s proceed to the Node.js code

Node.js

I’m going to use node-cron library for the cron job because it is very easy to use.

Run this command first to get the required libraries.

npm install node-cron axios

Create an index.js or name it whatever you want. Write ( or copy paste ) the code below

const cron = require("node-cron");

const axios = require("axios");

axios.defaults.headers.common['Authorization'] = 'token YOURAPIKEY'; // this is for tutorial purposes only. save this in your env variables! Best practice is don't commit your API keys!

axios.defaults.headers.common['Travis-API-Version'] =  '3';

axios.defaults.headers.post['Content-Type'] = 'application/json';

const payload = {

"request": {

"branch": "master"

}

}

cron.schedule("0 0 */4 * * *", function () {

axios.post(

'https://api.travis-ci.com/repo/brijmcq%2Ffoo/requests',

payload

);

});

Check out the node-cron github to see the syntax for the schedule.

Hope this helps. If you have a better way to do this, please do let me know!