Using sensitive data on your Travis CI build

You have programmed an amazing functional tests to validate your infrastructure service that connect on Google Docs.

These functional tests run perfect well on your development machine and now you want to run them on Travis CI, but how to do this without reveal your Google’s username and password worldwide?

Travis CI Encription Keys goes to the rescue! With them you can encrypt your sensitive data and read them inside your tests running on Travis CI.

In this post I will show you a very simple and real sample of using encryption keys to read username and password from environment variables encripted on .travis.yml file

Step 1:  Encrypting your environment variables

To perform the encryption using Travis CLI you will need to setup a Ruby environment on your dev machine. If you are using Windows and do not have a Ruby environment, the easiest way is use RubyInstaller (don’t be afraid, because it works very well…it’s a fully automatic installation).

After the RubyInstaller finish his job, open the “Start Command Prompt with Ruby” and type:

travis encrypt GDataUsername=[your username] -r [owner/repository]
travis encrypt GDataPassword=[your password] -r [owner/repository]

Step 2:  Adding your encrypted variables to the .travis.yml file

Open your .travis.yaml file and add the encrypted values from previous step to the file, like the sample below:

env:
   global:
      - secure: "The GDataUsername encrypted value"
      - secure: "The GDataPassword encrypted value"

The tabs are very important to the .yml file, so you should respect them. Here is my real .yml file to help.

Step 3:  Reading the enviroment variables on your functional test

Now you can read those environment variable in your code, the sample code below shows how to do this in C#:

var username = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("GDataUsername");
var password = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("GDataPassword");

The values of username and password variables will be the decrypted values that Travis CI has set to you on the environment.

Step 4: Testing on Travis CI

Commit your files to GitHub and take a look on Travis CI build log, if you have set everything ok, you should see lines as below on log:

$ export GDataUsername=[secure]
$ export GDataPassword=[secure]

That’s all!

Now your functional tests should run on your dev machine (don’t forget to set the environment variables on it too) and on Travis CI as well.