I'm working on using travis to launch a rai job, and this is what I have discovered so far:

The good:

1. It's pretty easy to add the secret_key to the .rai_profile by having a mostly-complete .rai_profile in the repository, and then echoing a secure environment variable into the .rai_profile as part of the travis build.
2. It's easy to download, extract, and execute a specific version of the rai client.

The bad:

1. If there is some server problem, rai will repeatedly print "Waiting for server..." which prevents travis from timing out as quickly, as there is continued stdout
2. The client is very very patient when waiting for the server to accept a job (maybe this isn't so bad in some contexts)

Thoughts:

1. Can we add a timeout option to the client, so it gives up on the server faster if there is a problem?
2. Can we add an option to the client so that it's output is more ci-friendly and less shell-friendly? Removing anything that repeatedly updates the same shell line (progress bars, animated tickers, so on).