There are 2 ways to go about notifying deployment from travis to rollbar. This particular case uses redeployment_hook from a cloud provider (cloud66 used here) and hence we are going to use before_deploy and after_deploy jobs to do it.

Rollbar has an api which can be used to get notified of deployments. It requires an access-token (project specific) with post_server_item scope, environment, revision (git sha/commit id). It also takes optional parameters like rollbar_username, local_username, comment and status. The details of the api can be found here.

We are going to use curl to notify the deployment to rollbar. First you’ll need to create or get the access token from https://rollbar.com/<organisation>/<project>/settings/access_tokens/. Basically, its in the respective project settings page. Once you have the token ready, we’ll move on to editing the .travis.yml file.

Add the following to .travis.yml

before_deploy:
  - export APPLICATION_NAME=name_of_the_application
  - export DEPLOY_ENV=$(if [ "${TRAVIS_BRANCH}" == "staging" ]; then echo "staging"; else echo "production"; fi)
  - export AUTHOR_NAME="$(git log -1 $TRAVIS_COMMIT --pretty="%aN")"
  - ./.rollbar.sh started
  - export DEPLOY_ID="$(while read -r line; do echo "$line"; done < ~/deploy_id_from_rollbar)"

deploy:
  - provider: cloud66
    redeployment_hook: "url_of_the_redeployment_hook_for_staging"
    on:
      branch: staging
  - provider: cloud66
    redeployment_hook: "url_of_the_redeployment_hook_for_production"
    on:
      branch: release

after_deploy:
  - ./.rollbar.sh succeeded

branches:
  only:
  - staging
  - release

There are few things happening above. We’ll go through it one by one.

export APPLICATION_NAME=name_of_the_application

This particular line is used to create an environment variable. We could have defined it in the env section of travis but there is an issue with that. Travis will execute n number of jobs if there are n enviroment variables defined in env section, once for each environment variable. This will make it so that there will only be one environment variable available at once which is defined in the env section.

export DEPLOY_ENV=$(if [ "${TRAVIS_BRANCH}" == "staging" ]; then echo "staging"; else echo "production"; fi)

This line is used to set the environment so that we can pass it to rollbar. We are using the branch which is getting deployed to do this since travis environment is test. If the branch is staging the DEPLOY_ENV is set to staging. Else it is set to production. This is based on the assumption that there are only 2 enviroments where you test using travis.

export AUTHOR_NAME="$(git log -1 $TRAVIS_COMMIT --pretty="%aN")"

This line used to get the person who committed or the person who merged the pull request which was responsible for travis starting. This can be passed to rollbar for info.

./.rollbar.sh started

This particular line evokes another script with an arguement. We haven’t written that script yet. Lets do that now.

#!/bin/bash
function start_deployment() {
  deploy_id="$(curl --request POST --url https://api.rollbar.com/api/1/deploy/ --data '{"access_token": "project_access_token_from_rollbar", "environment": "'"${DEPLOY_ENV}"'", "revision": "'"${TRAVIS_COMMIT}"'", "comment": "Deployment started in '"${DEPLOYENV}"' for '"${APPLICATION_NAME}"'", "status": "started", "local_username": "'"${AUTHOR_NAME}"'"}' | python -c 'import json, sys; obj = json.load(sys.stdin); print obj["data"]["deploy_id"]')"
  echo "$deploy_id" >> ~/deploy_id_from_rollbar
}

function set_deployment_success() {
  curl --request PATCH --url "https://api.rollbar.com/api/1/deploy/${DEPLOY_ID}?access_token=<project_access_token_from_rollbar>" --data '{"status": "succeeded"}'
}

if [ "$1" == "started" ]
then
  start_deployment started
else
  set_deployment_success succeeded
fi

Save it as .rollbar.sh. This script takes care of informing rollbar of the notification. Lets dissect it.

if [ "$1" == "started" ]
then
  start_deployment
else
  set_deployment_success
fi

This is the first to be executed. It checks whether the arguement to .rollbar.sh is started or not. If it is started, it invokes function start_deployment. Otherwise, it invokes the function, set_deployment_success.

function start_deployment() {
  deploy_id="$(curl --request POST --url https://api.rollbar.com/api/1/deploy/ --data '{"access_token": "project_access_token_from_rollbar", "environment": "'"${DEPLOY_ENV}"'", "revision": "'"${TRAVIS_COMMIT}"'", "comment": "Deployment started in '"${DEPLOYENV}"' for '"${APPLICATION_NAME}"'", "status": "started", "local_username": "'"${AUTHOR_NAME}"'"}' | python -c 'import json, sys; obj = json.load(sys.stdin); print obj["data"]["deploy_id"]')"
  echo "$deploy_id" >> ~/deploy_id_from_rollbar
}

This function executes a curl request to rollbar with the relevant data. Replace the project_access_token_from_rollbar with your project access token. The other info like environment, revision, application name and author name are obtained from environment variables set it .travis.yml. The response is a json which contains the deploy_id created by rollbar. This id is required to update the rollbar deployment which was started to success.

Since this particular script is executed inside a subshell, any enviroment variable set here won’t be available in travis.yml. So we’ll be writing it to a file using echo "$deploy_id" >> ~/deploy_id_from_rollbar.

function set_deployment_success() {
  curl --request PATCH --url "https://api.rollbar.com/api/1/deploy/${DEPLOY_ID}?access_token=<project_access_token_from_rollbar>" --data '{"status": "succeeded"}'
}

What this function does is to update the status of the rollbar deployment.

Continuing from earlier in travis.yml

  - ./.rollbar.sh started
  - export DEPLOY_ID="$(while read -r line; do echo "$line"; done < ~/deploy_id_from_rollbar)"

deploy:
  - provider: cloud66
    redeployment_hook: "url_of_the_redeployment_hook_for_staging"
    on:
      branch: staging
  - provider: cloud66
    redeployment_hook: "url_of_the_redeployment_hook_for_production"
    on:
      branch: release

after_deploy:
  - ./.rollbar.sh succeeded

branches:
  only:
  - staging
  - release

Once rollbar script is executed, we will set the id of the deployment as an environment variable.

export DEPLOY_ID="$(while read -r line; do echo "$line"; done < ~/deploy_id_from_rollbar)"

This line reads the deploy id from the file and set it to DEPLOY_ID. The deploy section for cloud66 and other associated providers can be found here.

The after_deploy script gets executed once the deployment is completed and it notifies rollbar of a successful deployment.

There are some improvements left to be made. I have searched but found no way of letting rollbar know when a deployment fails. Please do let me know if there are some ways for that.