Bash logic structures and conditionals (if, case, loops, etc.) in Travis CI

Travis CI's documentation often mentions the fact that it can call out to shell scripts in your repository, and recommends anything more complicated than a command or two (maybe including a pipe or something) be placed in a separate shell script.

But there are times when it's a lot more convenient to just keep the Travis CI-specific logic inside my repositories' .travis.yml file.

As it turns out, YAML is well-suited to, basically, inlining shell scripts. YAML's literal scalar indicator (a pipe, or |) allows you to indicate a block of content where newlines should be preserved, though whitespace before and after the line will be trimmed.

So if you have a statement like:

if [ "${variable}" == "something" ]; then
  do_something_here
fi

You can represent that in YAML via:

- |
  if [ "${variable}" == "something" ]; then
    do_something_here
  fi

Note that every line after the - | must be indented one more level (e.g. 2 spaces further).

So, in some of my .travis.yml files, I have logic that determines whether certain bits of code should run in certain environmental conditions (some of my projects run a large matrix of builds since I sometimes support 7 operating systems and sometimes multiple build processes in each!):

  # Check the status of PHP-FPM.
  - |
    if [ "${playbook}" == "test.yml" ]; then
      case "${distro}" in
        "centos7"|"fedora24")
          docker exec --tty ${container_id} env TERM=xterm systemctl --no-pager status php-fpm status
          docker exec --tty ${container_id} env TERM=xterm systemctl --no-pager status php-fpm status | grep -qF "fpm.service; enabled"
          ;;
        "debian8"|"ubuntu1604")
          docker exec --tty ${container_id} env TERM=xterm systemctl --no-pager status php${php_version}-fpm status
          docker exec --tty ${container_id} env TERM=xterm systemctl --no-pager status php${php_version}-fpm status | grep -qF "fpm.service; enabled"
          ;;
      esac
    fi

The above example was taken from my Ansible role for PHP's .travis.yml file.

I could technically do these things in one super-long line... but that's just sloppy. And if this started getting any more complex, it would be a good candidate for extracting into a separate shell script, as Travis' documentation suggests.