If you're a Travis-CI user, like many projects are, you'll find this new post from Raphael Stolt very interesting. In it he provides "eight knobs" you can use to improve your use of the service and optimize your test runs.

After having refactored several Travis CI configuration files over the last weeks, this post will provide eight adjustments or patterns immediately applicable for faster, changeable, and economic builds.

Suggestions in his list include:

• Reduce git clone depth
• Configure PHP versions in an include
• Only do static code analysis or code coverage measurement once
• Run integration tests on very xth build

For each item on the list he includes the updates you'll need to make to your .travis.yml configuration to enable/disable the feature.