Most of the time, we need a database to test our applications. This can be tricky to setup in a Continuous Integration test environment, but Travis CI makes it pretty easy.
Normally you would need to create a database on another online service then set the database URL as an environment variable on your CI service. With Travis, you just need to specify the database as a service in your Travis configuration file (.travis.yml). By doing so, Travis creates a database for you and sets the database URL as an environment variable automatically.
Travis provides support for a number of popular databases but I am going to show how to set this up for MongoDB. To provide some context, this configuration is for a Node.js app that uses a MongoDB database.
.travis.yml file
language: node_js
node_js:
- node
- 5
# database service
services:
- MongoDB
For setting up more databases and other configuration settings, check out the Travis CI Setting up Databases docs.