Better CI for the Yesod scaffoldings

After having completely forgotten to do this for a long time, I finally set aside some time last night to fix up the Travis CI for the Yesod scaffoldings. We have a number of different flavors of scaffoldings (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, simple, and minimal), and keep all of the different flavors as branches on a single repo so that improvements to the base scaffolding can easily be merged into all of the others. The goal of my changes was to:

• Have Travis check against the different snapshots likely to be selected by the stack new command
• Automate testing against live databases, so that I can be lazy and not set up those databases for local testing

Overall, this went pretty smoothly, and also serves as a nice example of a short Stack-based Travis configuration. You can see the latest PostgreSQL Travis configuration.

Beyond my desire to be lazy in the scaffolding release process, the other obvious benefit is much more confidence when review PRs against the scaffolding that things will actually work.

Interesting discoveries

I discovered two things in this work that I hadn't realized previously:

• Due to a dependency on a relatively recent yesod-auth version, only LTS Haskell 6 and up and Stackage Nightly are supported by the scaffolding. Therefore, for the build matrix, I haven't included LTS 5 and lower.
• I was unaware of a bug in GHC 8.0.1 which prevents the scaffolding from compiling. This bug has already been resolved upstream and the fix will be included in GHC 8.0.2. In the meanwhile, I've blocked GHC 8.0.1 from usage in the scaffolding.

Upon reflection, this is probably a good thing: we are all but guaranteed that a new user will start off with LTS 6, which is a well tested set of packages and a very stable GHC version, leading to hopefully little user friction when getting started.

A user could in theory do something like stack new foo yesod-simple --resolver lts-5 --solver, but I think it's fair to assume that someone passing in such specific flags knows what he/she is doing and we should just stay out of his/her way.

Contributing

Now that CI is in better shape, this is a good time to remind everyone of how to contribute to the Yesod scaffoldings. The PostgreSQL scaffolding is considered the base, with the other flavors merging in changes from there. If you want to make a change, please submit a PR to the postgres branch of the yesod-scaffold repo. If you have a patch which is specific to one of the scaffoldings instead (like changing MySQL config settings), please submit it to that branch.

Note that it is not supported to send pull requests against the .hsfiles files in the stack-templates repo, as such changes can't be properly tested, and will be overwritten the next time a change from the yesod-scaffold repo is merged in.