Document language: generic

[BanzaiMan]

The only current mention of this is in multi-os doc.

This is worth mentioning either as a section the languages page, or a page of its own.

[acnagy]

There are a few different ways to end up in the same place as language: generic. Is it worth listing them all?

[BanzaiMan]

@acnagy IMO, yes, all except for __connie__, which is an obscure implementation detail that is likely to change over time.

[hessam61]

Is there a difference between minimal and generic for language? Any update on adding documentation for either of these languages? It seems that minimal is no longer supported, is that correct?

[Wilfred]

Apparently there's language: bash too, according to this comment. It's not clear if there's any advantage of using that over generic.

[Wilfred]

OK, it looks like bash and generic are equivalent. See this PR. This PR suggests that sh and shell are equivalent too.

This comment suggests that Ruby is the default if you don't use generic, so I imagine the build will be a little slower.

Finally, the only documentation mention of generic is in this section of the multi-os docs, as mentioned above.

[MariadeAnton]

We've introduced a language tag switch and now language: minimal is available instead.
Using language: minimal in either container-based and fully virtualized infras, it comes with fewer pre-installed languages and services and more disk space.

As Anna mentioned, language: minimal points to the same image as language: bash, language: sh and language: shell.

And we're working on documenting this option in our language and infrastructure reference docs.

Thanks much for your patience y'all!

[MariadeAnton]

As an extra note - this time claryfing languague: generic.

Using language: generic with our stable, Trusty image, will point to a complete image so that someone can use many/none programming language:

https://github.com/travis-ci/packer-templates/blob/master/cookbooks/travis_ci_garnet/attributes/default.rb#L136-L151

[Wilfred]

@MariadeAnton just to clarify: is bash different from minimal, and if so, how?

[plaindocs]

Somewhat related to #862

[MariadeAnton]

@Wilfred the image in which they run and default script commands run by Travis CI will be the same.

The difference comes in with language: generic which points to our a larger image which contains more runtimes and services, and runs the same script as minimal - https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/blob/master/lib/travis/build/script/generic.rb

https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/blob/master/lib/travis/build.rb#L41-L42

[stale]

Thanks for contributing to this issue. As it has been 90 days since the last activity, we are automatically closing the issue. This is often because the request was already solved in some way and it just wasn't updated or it's no longer applicable. If that's not the case, please do feel free to either reopen this issue or open a new one. We'll gladly take a look again! You can read more here: https://blog.travis-ci.com/2018-03-09-closing-old-issues

[edmorley]

Still relevant

[stale]

Thanks for contributing to this issue. As it has been 90 days since the last activity, we are automatically closing the issue. This is often because the request was already solved in some way and it just wasn't updated or it's no longer applicable. If that's not the case, please do feel free to either reopen this issue or open a new one. We'll gladly take a look again! You can read more here: https://blog.travis-ci.com/2018-03-09-closing-old-issues

[tooomm]

Can you please reopen or link me to the docs @BanzaiMan ?

[LondonAppDev]

I've just started using Travis CI and I was a bit confused by the choice of languages. I run all CI steps within docker containers, so I was looking for a language option with minimal dependencies to try and speed up the builds.

After reading the full list of languages (as defined here) I assumed it was not possible to run travis builds without dependencies for a specific language.

After quite a bit of digging/search I found there is also generic and bash.

As a new user to travis I definitely feel it would be beneficial if there was a full list of language options in one place.

[DeeDeeG]

For those coming here from search engines (Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo...)

The pull request #1989 by @plaindocs added documentation for this.

See this page: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/languages/minimal-and-generic/

[dwijnand]

Would be nice if these were linked somehow in https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/languages/. Took me a wild roundabout way to finally find that doc page.

[DeeDeeG]

I agree with @dwijnand. (I had meant to make a pull request for this, but I couldn't figure out exactly how to do it, so I gave up!)

Edit: Perhaps we just need to add an entry to this file:
https://github.com/travis-ci/docs-travis-ci-com/blob/master/_data/languages.yml

Minimal And Generic: "/user/languages/minimal-and-generic/"

[jabl]

So is the "language: generic" image a superset of all the various "language: foo" images, or is it somewhere in between minimal and the language-specific images?

In this case we're running tests in docker, but before firing up docker we're running a node-based dockerfile linter, so we need access to the "npm" tool to install it. Unfortunately "language: minimal" doesn't work because it doesn't have npm. So what is the best "language: " tag to choose here?

[G00fY2]

The documentation is also wrong about stating only language:generic has jvm support. Actually trusty and bionic have preinstalled jdk in language:minimal. If I am not totally thats because the recipe here: https://github.com/travis-ci/packer-templates/blob/master/cookbooks/travis_ci_ubuntu_1804_minimal/recipes/default.rb#L46