Sometimes you need to run differently tests for pull requests on Travis CI. In this post I’m going to explain how you can do this.

At first, you must should ensure «Build pull requests» option is enabled Travis’ settings page:

If all right, let us try to add specific test for pull requests.

Restrictions when testing PR

Travis give us opportunity to run different tests only to situations where pull requests entirely. It provide us to access the environment variable ${TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST} is set to false when the build is for a normal branch commit. When the build is for a pull request, it will contain the pull request’s number.

Below is an example form .travis.yml that runs npm test for regular build and npm run pull-test for pull requests.

script:
- '[ "${TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST}" = "false" ] && npm test || npm run pull-test'

That’s a bash condition that check if ${TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST} equals false and run different tasks depends on value.

Conclusion

Use this when you wanna testing pull request in other way than regular branch. I use this approach for deploying this site after every commit and just test build for pull requests. Check out my .travis.yml for more.