Does Travis CI Check more than one .travis.yml file? - phpunit

Question

I'm just starting with Continuous Integration using Travis CI.
I have this file at the TLD of my repo:
sudo: false
language: php
php:
- '7.1'
This is how Travis CI sees my config:
{
"os": "linux",
"php": "7.1",
"dist": "trusty",
"sudo": false,
"group": "stable",
"language": "php",
}
Why is the build failing with a phpunit error? Could it be because of another .travis.yml file within the repo?
Network availability confirmed.
...edited for brevity...
git.checkout
0.34s$ git clone ...edited for brevity...
$ php --version
PHP 7.1.11 (cli) (built: Oct 26 2017 16:25:55) ( ZTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2017 The PHP Group
...edited for brevity...
$ composer --version
Composer version 1.6.5 2018-05-04 11:44:59
0.15s$ phpunit
PHPUnit 6.4.3 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.
Usage: phpunit [options] UnitTest [UnitTest.php]
phpunit [options] <directory>
...edited for brevity...
The command "phpunit" exited with 2.
Done. Your build exited with 1.
I'm not sure where to look next.

Answer 1

phpunit exits with an error because you haven't told phpunit where to look for your tests. Typically you would do this by placing phpunit.xml in the base directory of your repo. Among other things, phpunit.xml tells phpunit which directory contains your tests.
Your phpunit.xmlshould contain something like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<phpunit colors="true">
<testsuites>
<testsuite name="Your application name">
<directory>./tests/</directory>
</testsuite>
</testsuites>
</phpunit>
Replace ./tests/ with the relative path to the folder containing your test files.
To test out your configuration, run phpunit while in the base directory of your repo. You should see the same result that Travis CI does.

Answer 2

As per the docs, "Travis CI uses .travis.yml file in the root of your repository to learn about your project and how you want your builds to be executed."
It wants something to run and defaults to running phpunit, which will fail without at least one test to run.
So for a placeholder build one could create a bash script in the same directory as the .travis.yml file, make it executable and point to it like this:
sudo: false
language: php
php:
- '7.1'
before_install:
- chmod +x build.sh
script: ./build.sh
This is a "build" script:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo This is a placeholder.