Chimera allows you to run your tests on multiple Linux distributions. It is designed to work with any language, testing library and any CI platform that supports Docker.

First, you'll need to install the chimera cli:

npm install -g chimera-cli

Then, create a .chimera.yml configuration file in your project root. For a Node.js project, something like this is a good starting point:

install:
  - npm install
script:
  - npm test
docker:
  socketPath: /var/run/docker.sock
targets:
  ubuntu:
    tags:
      - "14.04"
      - "15.10"
    install:
      - apt-get update -qq
      - apt-get upgrade -y -qq
      - apt-get install nodejs nodejs-legacy npm -y -qq
  fedora:
    tags:
      - "22"
      - "23"
    install:
      - dnf update -y -q
      - dnf install node npm -y -q

To execute the configuration, simply invoke chimera.

• install is where you install dependencies.

• env sets environment variables.

• script defines your main test commands.

• docker is the Docker client configuration passed to dockerode.

• targets defines the images you want to test on.

  • image is name of the image (optional, defaults to target name)
  • tags sets the tags
  • install runs before the top level install
  • env sets environment variables

Chimera renders install and env as Handlebar templates. For example, to install EPEL on CentOS, you add this:

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-{{tag}}.noarch.rpm -y -q

The following template variables are available:

• name: image name
• tag: image tag
• id: unique container id

Run chimera --help to get the full list of available options.

• -f, --file <path> sets configuration file, by default .chimera.yml in the current directory.

• -p, --project <path> sets the project directory that is copied to /project inside containers. By default, this is the current directory.

• -t, --target <image:tag> sets the target(s) to run, either in the form of image (run all tags of image) or image:tag (single tag). You can also set this option using the environment variable CHIMERA_TARGET.

Use chimera generate travis to generate a .travis.yml based on your Chimera configuration. Here is a example:

language: node_js
sudo: required
services:
  - docker
install:
  - npm install -g chimera-cli
script:
  - chimera
env:
  matrix:
    - CHIMERA_TARGET=ubuntu:14.04
    - CHIMERA_TARGET=ubuntu:15.10
    - CHIMERA_TARGET=fedora:22
    - CHIMERA_TARGET=fedora:23