How to Trigger a Travis CI Build Without Admin Privileges

Sometimes Travis CI builds fail due to sporadic timeouts, network errors, etc. While these non-code errors can be quite annoying, Travis CI has a handy Restart build for when these situations occur, but only users with admin privileges have access to this feature.

This limitation becomes significant when contributing to open-source projects. Given that a well-organized repository will only allow Pull Requests (PR) to be merged upon successful builds, non-code build errors hamper this process. Non-admin contributors (i.e., most users) won’t be able to restart the build in the Travis CI interface.

Instead of asking an admin to restart a build, Git allows for empty commits. Just make sure to leave a good commit message.

git commit --allow-empty -m "Hello World!"

The above command will trigger a CI build without any changes to the source.