How to migrate from Travis-ci.org to .com

it’s not as simple as you might assume.

5 min readAug 30, 2021

For a while now Travis-ci.org has been showing that we would soon need to migrate to Travis-ci.com which I assumed was just a matter of URL change and that it would require no action on my part.

Today I did some changes to 2 of my public libraries, and I do test them locally but I trust Travis to run the tests on multiple PHP versions. To my surprise Travis-ci didn’t I, therefore, couldn’t be sure my changes were working on older versions of PHP.

I had to migrate to Travis-ci.com; So here is my small journey of migration that as the title suggested was more complicated than I thought it would be. Spoilers, it’s not technically complicated it’s just that the documentation is not complete.

If you are not interested in my journey you can just skip to the second part of this article on how to do a migration from Travis-ci.org to Travis-ci.com

My journey to migrate

My first step was to create an account on Travis-ci.com using my github account. This was easy enough; after doing this I was asked to enable the Travis integration in GitHub. A link sent me to the right page and it was easy.

At first, all looked well, I could see a few of my projects. But then I realized that I was missing the repository I just had updated and wanted to try. Digging a bit more I found that all the repositories that I was missing all the repositories I had on Travis-ci.org.

I realized at this point that I probably had to do a migration. I found this documentation. I followed the documentation till the step where it asked me to migrate

The thing is, I couldn't. it said I needed to sign up to the beta to perform this action. This confused me, my data had not migrated to Travis-ci.com, so why wouldn’t I be able to simply create a new project in Travis? I was ready at this point to set up my project from scratch. But I couldn’t find any way to do that either because those projects wouldn’t show up on Travis-ci.com.

I found this behaviour extremely strange. I mean if it can detect that the projects are already in Travis-ci.com why not just migrate them? And if Travis-ci.org has been disabled why isn’t there a procedure that’s not in beta?

I found myself in a dilemma:

I can’t register my old libraries because they exist in .org
I can’t migrate them from .org without registering to the beta.

Not finding any solution I ended up subscribing to the beta is easy enough. And a few minutes later I have the migrate button 🎊 🎉.

I select my projects to migrate and nothing; there are a few loading screens the migration seems to happen; but then; nothing. I can’t see a single project under my account anymore. I enter the URL of the project, and there I can see it. I see the history and everything. But it’s not visible under my repositories.

After a bit more frustration, it was a simple fix as well. I just logged out and logged in again. Good thing I am used to Magento…

Now I can see the migrated projects, so I do a commit in order to have a new build test my latest code that at this point I need to publish asap.

Nothing happens, Looking around a bit in Travis I find this error:

Could not authorize build request for

Looking on the internet I found that by default the “Free Plan” is not selected. Therefore Travis considers that I can’t build at all. So I needed to enable the Free plan manually.

And now we are in business, and my builds are running once more.

Travis is definitively one of the best tools out there, and the service it provides for free is great. The detection of projects in Travis-ci.org exists. So why not use that to display to the user the procedure directly? That would have make it more simple? There are probably technical reasons why the update is not more transparent. But a simple list of things to do would have allowed me and probably others to gain literally hours.

Hopefully, this little how-to migrate, can help a few of you with some of the frustration I had.