purcell / Nix Emacs Ci
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Emacs installations for continuous integration
This project aims to provide a method for Emacs Lisp authors to easily test their code against a wide variety of Emacs versions.
The rationale for this is that EVM and Damien Cassou's PPA have had various issues in my usage of them, and the latter is now unmaintained.
Goals:
- Usable without Nix knowledge
- Clear, simple docs and setup, initially primarily for Travis and Github Actions
- Binary caching, ie. pre-built executables, via Cachix (a wonderful service!)
- Both Linux and MacOS support
- Minimal installations by default, for download speed: no images, no
window-system
- Allow easy local testing
Status
- Official release versions from 23.4 onwards are supported (MacOS: 24.3 onwards, see issue #4)
- An Emacs development snapshot build is also available
- Binary caching via Cachix is enabled, and working
- A Github Action is available for easy integration with your workflows
- Early Travis integration is tested and in use elsewhere (e.g. my emacs config and various other github projects) but see notes below.
Travis usage
Here's some example usage: caution that this early method may change. Early adopters should watch issue #6 to be kept up to date with changes to the recommended usage method.
language: nix
os:
- linux
- osx
env:
- EMACS_CI=emacs-24-1
- EMACS_CI=emacs-24-5
- EMACS_CI=emacs-25-3
- EMACS_CI=emacs-26-3
- EMACS_CI=emacs-27-1
- EMACS_CI=emacs-snapshot
install:
# The default "emacs" executable on the $PATH will now be the version named by $EMACS_CI
- bash <(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/purcell/nix-emacs-ci/master/travis-install)
script:
- ... your commands go here ...
Github Actions usage
The purcell/setup-emacs
Github
Action is available for easy
integration with your Github workflows.
Low-level Nix usage, e.g. for local testing
First, ensure you have cachix
enabled, to obtain cached binaries:
nix-env -iA cachix -f https://cachix.org/api/v1/install
cachix use emacs-ci
Then, evaluate one of the emacs-*
expressions in default.nix
. You
can do this without first downloading the contents of this repo,
e.g. here's how you would add a specific version to your Nix profile:
nix-env -iA emacs-25-2 -f https://github.com/purcell/nix-emacs-ci/archive/master.tar.gz
The above command mutates your user-level profile, so you probably
don't want to do that when testing locally. There'll be a nix-shell
equivalent of this, in order to run a command inside a transient
environment containing a specific Emacs, but I haven't figured that
out yet.
Using newer snapshot builds
snapshot
builds aim to be a relatively recent commit on the Emacs
master branch, and do not automatically give you the very latest Emacs
revision available via Git. That would defeat binary caching, so the
current plan is to periodically update the -snapshot
builds
manually. Send me a pull request to do this:
- Update the commit named in
default.nix
- Try
nix-build -A emacs-snapshot
. - This will fail due to SHA256 checksum mismatch of the downloaded archive, so now update that too, and rebuild.
- Now submit the change as a pull request.
- Once merged, we'll all be testing against a newer snapshot build.
What patches are applied to these binaries, and why?
There's a tension between having a CI binary that is easily usable for the majority of testing purposes, and one that faithfully reproduces the known broken behaviour of that version in certain circumstances. Binaries for old Emacs versions "in the wild" will have been built with various old versions of GNUTLS and other libraries, and there is no single way to reproduce all their quirks.
For this project, we are doing the least patching that will allow the
older Emacsen to install packages from ELPA over HTTPS using a recent
version of GNUTLS. (While older versions used the http
ELPA URL
anyway, cask
uses https
unconditionally.) This involves applying
patches for the E_AGAIN
issue that was fixed in 26.3, plus a patch
to let old Emacsen find the system cert store on recent OSX versions.
Additionally, the ELPA package signing key has changed and no longer
matches the public key that was bundled with older Emacs releases
(25.x), which meant that those releases could not now install ELPA
packages with stock settings: package-check-signatures
needed to be
disabled, or the new public key imported into the user's keychain. To
avoid this issue, we bundle the latest public keys into all builds.
Finally, minor patches are applied as necessary to allow very old
Emacs versions to compile against newer glibc
versions.
💝 Support this project and my other Open Source work via Patreon