How to publish artifacts in Travis CI?

Question

GitHub releases step-by-step

The method was mentioned at https://stackoverflow.com/a/24100779/895245, and is poorly documented at: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/releases/ , so here goes a more detailed step-by-step.

It uploads artifacts to GitHub releases https://github.com/<username>/<repo>/releases which exist for every Git tag you push.

Get a Personal Access Token under https://github.com/settings/tokens

Only enable “public_repo” access for public repositories, “repo” for private.

Save the token somewhere as you can only see it once.
Install the travis gem:
```
gem install travis
# See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/33119804/895245
gem update --system
```
Then cd into your repository and:
```
travis encrypt <api-token>
```
but more recently people have reported that travis encrypt -r githubusername/repositoryname --org is needed instead, see: https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/8128

This will produce an output like:
```
secure: "<encrypted-token>"
```
Note down the large encrypted token.
Use a .travis.yml as follows:
```
script:
  # This command generates a release.zip file.
  - make dist
deploy:
  provider: releases
  api_key:
    secure: "<encrypted-token>"
  file: 'release.zip'
  skip_cleanup: true
  on:
    tags
```
What happens is that Travis replaces every something: secure: <encrypted-string> with just something: <decrypted-string> as explained at: http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/encryption-keys/

This is safe because only authorized pushes by you can decrypt the string, so if a malicious user tries to make a pull request to get your string, it would should just show the encrypted string.

Now whenever you push a commit with a tag, Travis will upload release.zip to the release:
```
git commit -m 1.0
git tag -m 1.0 1.0
git push --tags
```
If you had already pushed the commit and the tag after, you might have to click the “Restart build” button on the Travis UI for it to upload.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/38037626/895245 has some screenshots of the process.

Alternative method: environment variable

Instead of an encrypted string, we could also use a hidden environment variable.

On the Travis settings for the repository https://travis-ci.org/<me>/<myrepo>/settings create an environment variable:
```
GITHUB_API_KEY=<token>
```
and make sure to mark “Display value in build log” as “Off”, and use:
```
api_key: '$GITHUB_API_KEY'
```
While this will not show on logs for pull requests, this method is riskier, as you could my mistake list the environment of a build.

The upside is that this method is simpler to understand.

A simple example of mine that uploads images generated from Gnuplot to GitHub releases:

https://github.com/cirosantilli/gnuplot-examples/blob/b76d5a7c7aa2af973accdc9639220df74c36285e/.travis.yml#L23
https://github.com/cirosantilli/gnuplot-cheat/releases

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