> Tests that only fail in CI are really annoying. I’ve had this a couple of times, and it’s always taken hours to sort out, because the “try something, get results, think about what they mean” cycle is so slow.
To address this, CircleCI has an interesting feature where you can enable SSH access to the build, so one can investigate locally (relative to the build) instead of repeatedly throwing code over the wall and waiting for something remotely meaningful to come back in logs.
Travis actually has this[1], too, if you ask their support to have the feature beta enabled for your repo. A while back, I was having a CI only test failure that was a massive pain to try and debug, and this helped enormously as I could explore the build state and try alternatives without waiting on the typical build time.
To address this, CircleCI has an interesting feature where you can enable SSH access to the build, so one can investigate locally (relative to the build) instead of repeatedly throwing code over the wall and waiting for something remotely meaningful to come back in logs.