Integrate your Postman tests with Travis CI using Newman

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is a development practice that encourages developers to commit their code changes to a shared repository on a regular basis. With CI/CD, developers might commit their code as often as several times a day. This approach helps the team avoid technical debt and detect problems.

With CI/CD, every code commit triggers an automated process that builds the code, runs tests, and can even deploy the updated code if all checks pass. This integrated process ensures a smooth, efficient workflow and maintains code quality throughout the development cycle.

Developing an API? Postman offers built-in tools to integrate your API with some of the most popular continuous integration (CI) tools, including Travis CI. After you set up CI for your API, you can view the status of builds or kick off a new build, all from within Postman. You can also use Newman to run API tests as part of your CI pipeline. To learn more, see CI integrations.

Run Postman tests with Travis CI

In general, integrating your Postman tests with Travis CI is the same process as running on Jenkins, AppVeyor, or any other build system. You will set up your CI configuration to run a shell command when starting your build. The command is a Newman script that runs the collection containing the tests and returns a pass or fail exit code that's logged in your CI system.

This example shows you how to integrate Postman with Travis CI, a continuous integration platform that development teams use to automatically build and test code changes. When you're finished, Travis CI will run your tests every time you make a commit to your GitHub repo.

Get started

1. Choose the Postman Collection with your tests. In most cases, you'll already have a Postman Collection with your tests. For this example, you can import a sample "Hello World" collection into your workspace by selecting this Run in Postman button.

   

2. Set up a GitHub repository. Travis CI is free for open source projects on GitHub. For this example, you'll store the collection with your Postman tests in a public GitHub repository. Create a new public repo on GitHub and clone the project to your local system.

3. Set up Travis CI. Follow the Travis CI getting started guide for a complete walk through. You will need to sign in to Travis CI and activate Travis CI integration for your new public GitHub repo.

Connect Postman to Travis CI

1. Export the "Hello World" collection as a JSON file and rename the exported file hello_world.postman_collection.json.

2. Create a folder named tests at the root of your local project, and move the exported JSON file into the new tests folder.

   .
   └── tests
       └── hello_world.postman_collection.json
   

   If your collection uses an environment, you also need to export the environment as a JSON file and move it to the tests folder.

3. Create a new file named .travis.yml at the root of your project repository. You'll use this file to tell Travis CI the programming language for your project and how to build it.

   .
   ├── .travis.yml
   └── tests
       └── hello_world.postman_collection.json
   

   Any step of the build process can be customized. The scripts in the .travis.yml file will run the next time you commit and push a change to your repo.

4. In the .travis.yml file, add a command to install Newman in the CI environment, and then add a script telling Newman to run the Postman tests (which you placed in the tests folder).

   Because Travis CI doesn't know where Newman is located, you need to update the PATH. In this example, the newman tool is located in the .bin folder which is in the node_modules folder.

   For this example, your .travis.yml file will look like the following:

   language: node_js
   node_js:
   - "16.13.2"
   
   install:
   - npm install newman
   
   before_script:
   - node --version
   - npm --version
   - node_modules/.bin/newman --version
   
   script:
   - node_modules/.bin/newman run tests/hello_world.postman_collection.json
   

   Note that if you exported an environment, you need to add it to the script as well:

   script:
   - node_modules/.bin/newman run tests/hello_world.postman_collection.json -e tests/tests.postman_environment.json
   

5. Commit all the changes to your local project and push them to your public GitHub repo.

   Travis CI will automatically trigger a build and run your tests every time you push a commit to your repo. Open the Travis CI dashboard to get details about the status of your build. If all went well, your build was successful.

   

Fix test failures

What do things look like when a test fails? To find out, make a change in your imported "Hello World" collection in Postman so that one of the tests breaks.

To view a failed test, do the following:

1. Open the collection, select the "Hello World" request, and then select the Scripts > Post-response tab.

2. Change the final test so that it looks for the text "Hello, Everyone!" instead of "Hello, World!"

   

3. Save the change and then export the collection again. As before, rename the exported file hello_world.postman_collection.json and move it into the tests directory in your local project.

4. Commit and push the change to your public GitHub repo. This will trigger a new build in Travis CI, and this time the build will fail.

   

5. Select the failed build link to view the build logs in Travis CI. The logs will tell you that the assertion failed. If this was your own collection, you could use the error message to help understand why the test failed and debug the problem.

   

6. For this example, if you want, you can correct the error in the test in Postman and export the collection again. As before, rename the JSON file, add it to the tests folder in your local project, then commit and push. This time your build in Travis CI will be successful.