travis CI with Common Lisp.

Common Lisp tooling typically isn't oriented around the continuous integration/build systems that we're accustomed to in 2014.

I don't terribly like that, particularly since it's one of the few tools that have been demonstrated to work, and work well, in software engineering.

Anyway, I updated my TOML parser to work with (Travis CI)[https://github.com/pnathan/pp-toml] (but the principles are the same regardless of box host). Here's the code, followed by a write-up.

As a YAML:

before_script:
  - curl -O -L http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sbcl/sbcl-1.2.6-x86-64-linux-binary.tar.bz2
  - tar xjf sbcl-1.2.6-x86-64-linux-binary.tar.bz2
  - pushd sbcl-1.2.6-x86-64-linux/ && sudo bash install.sh && popd
  - curl -O -L http://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp
  - sbcl --load quicklisp.lisp --eval '(quicklisp-quickstart:install)' --eval '(quit)'
script:
  - sbcl --script run-sbcl-tests.lisp

Where the run-sbcl-tests.lisp looks as follows:

#!/usr/local/bin/sbcl
(require "sb-posix")
#-quicklisp
 (let ((quicklisp-init (merge-pathnames "quicklisp/setup.lisp"
        (user-homedir-pathname))))
  (when (probe-file quicklisp-init)
   (load quicklisp-init)))
(defparameter *pwd* (concatenate 'string (sb-posix:getcwd) "/"))
(push *pwd* asdf:*central-registry*)
(ql:quickload :pp-toml-tests)
(let ((result-status (pp-toml-tests:run-tests)))
 (sb-posix:exit (if result-status 0 1) ))

Under the hood and in Lisp, pp-toml-tests:run-tests drives some fiveAM code to run the extant tests. FiveAM is, as far as I can tell, designed for on-the-fly interactive testing, as most Lisp tooling is. It was entirely too surprising in an integration with continuous integration. I've written my own bad hack for a unit testing framework, the "checker" system, designed for running in CI, but it's kind of, well, a bad hack. I should look elsewhere.

A few key highlights of what's going on in this code:

1. I use old-style ASDF registry manipulation to dynamically set where we should be expecting our systems under test to be.
2. This code relies on the SB-POSIX SBCL extension - I expect other systems will be able to do the same functionality, but SBCL is what I primarily use.
3. I hand-load Quicklisp each time. That's not ideal, and should be changed when I update pp-toml to TOML 0.3.

Hope this helps your Common Lisp integration testing!