.travis.yml file

I'm going with the standard approach of having all the requirements that pip will install in requirements.txt. Travis CI comes with pip already installed so this is particularly easy.

language: python

python:
  - "3.4"

services: mysql

env:
  global:
    - DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="my_site.settings"
    - PYTHONPATH="/home/travis/build/my_github_name/my_github_project"
    - PIP_USE_MIRRORS=true
    - BUILD_ON_TRAVIS=true
  matrix:
    - DJANGO=1.7 DB=mysql

#commands to install dependencies
install:
  - pip install -q Django==$DJANGO
  - pip install -q -r requirements.txt

before_script:
  - mysql -e 'create database travis_ci_db;'
  - python manage.py syncdb --noinput

#command to run the test suite
script:
  - python manage.py test

If you need to add anything else the before_script and after_script sections are the place to do it. For example if you wanted to test against PEP8 or run something like PyLint you could put that in before_script.

Django Settings

We will need to change our settings in Django to use the Travis CI database. Note that in the YAML file I added a global environment variable BUILD_ON_TRAVIS. That lets us change only the settings we need for Travis in settings.py:

import os

#Use the following live settings to build on Travis CI
if os.getenv('BUILD_ON_TRAVIS', None):
    SECRET_KEY = "SecretKeyForUseOnTravis"
    DEBUG = False
    TEMPLATE_DEBUG = True

    DATABASES = {
        'default': {
            'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
            'NAME': 'travis_ci_db',
            'USER': 'travis',
            'PASSWORD': '',
            'HOST': '127.0.0.1',
        }
    }
else:
    #Non-travis DB configuration goes here

Now all you need to do is get the repository set up and try pushing your changes!

Alternative approach

An alternative approach is to have a travis_settings.py file which is essentially the same as your Django project's settings.py but has the relevant changes for use with the Travis CI databases. Note that this removes the need for the environment variable but instead adds the need for an additional settings file. With this approach the .travis.yml file would look something like this:

language: python

python:
  - "3.4"

services: mysql

env:
  global:
    - DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="my_site.travis_settings"
    - PYTHONPATH="/home/travis/build/my_github_name/my_github_project"
    - PIP_USE_MIRRORS=true
  matrix:
    - DJANGO=1.7 DB=mysql

#commands to install dependencies
install:
  - pip install -q Django==$DJANGO
  - pip install -q -r requirements.txt

before_script:
  - mysql -e 'create database travis_ci_db;'
  - python manage.py syncdb --noinput

#command to run the test suite
script:
  - python manage.py test

Python 3.7+ compatibility

Recent versions of Python won't work this same way on TravisCI. This is something that came up in my post about A day in the life of a package maintainer where I show you why this is an issue and how to fix it.

The quick summary is that the default image on Travis is too old to run Python 3.7 (see https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/9815) To fix this you have to explicitly set the distro in .travis.yml to be xenial. See my other post for an example .travis.yml file that will support Python 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7.