We are all awaiting the day when all of us can get TravisCI Pro and get all of that testing goodness into our private repositories right? And by that I mean, having our PRs annotated with build status, running automated tests and such.

Well, there is a work around to it, if you use Jenkins as your CI server. We have now set this up on our private repositories and it works like a charm!

Setting up Jenkins to annotate PRs

Considering you already have a setup of Jenkins that works with GitHub repositories but does builds based on watching master, this is what you need to get going with annotating PRs:

1. Upgrade Jenkins to v1.500+
2. Install the GitHub pull request builder plugin
3. Follow the setup steps detailed on that page.
   • Admins and whitelist users should be placed one per line.
   • In global settings: you can leave Access Token blank
   • Your “bot” user must have pull/push permissions
4. Sit back and watch PR annotation goodness
5. I do recommend that you make this a simple build: unit tests and coding standard checks only, you want this to be quick, so I also turn off code coverage analysis.

This is what shows up on our PRs:

You can also use comments to trigger re-builds, or allow builds on non-whitelist uses.