Most of you who know me have heard me talk about Armstrong, the open-source news platform that I helped create when I first joined the Texas Tribune. I have and continue to talk at length about Armstrong and its future, but I’ve never collected those thoughts into one cohesive document outlining how we got to where we are now, what the current state of the project is, and where I hope to see it go.

Last month I blogged about using Travis CI with Armstrong. Things have been going along fine until the last few weeks. Tests were failing due to network timeouts while talking to PyPI. Never one to take failing tests lightly, I set out to fix it. From local testing, it appeared that there was some sort of selective filtering happening at the server level on PyPI that was causing our tests to fail.

Today I took my name back and got Armstrong tests running on Travis CI. Travis CI is the distributed, community run continuous integration server that the Ruby community has put together. It lets you do all manner of fun things, like testing in dozens of different Ruby version configurations. You’re probably wondering what Armstrong is doing there with all of this talk of Ruby. No, I didn’t rewrite Armstrong in Rails last night.

We released our first version of Armstrong this past Wednesday. After taking a quick breather, I set out on getting Armstrong setup inside a Vagrant virtual machine to make evaluation easy. I finally got it running. There’s more information about getting started in the README, where it belongs, but I ran into some interesting technical issues while setting it up that I want to document here. Vagrant + Puppet + pip I initially wanted to create a full build-script inside Vagrant that could be used to setup the entire environment.

Two weekends ago I quietly rolled out a new feature that people have been clamoring for here at TravisSwicegood.com. Feeds for tags. So say you’re only interested in following my personal posts, you can add that tag page to your favorite RSS reader to subscribe to it. Or if you’re geeky, you might want to subscribe to my armstrong feed but don’t like the automagical discovery. In that case, just add /atom/ to the end of the URL and you’ve got your RSS feed.