travislint 
Disclaimer: I have no connection to travis-ci at all other than being a satisfied customer. I wrote this utility to avoid having to install Ruby, dependencies etc in order to run the travis-ci command line tool which does far more than I actually needed.
What It Does
This is a Python utility that parses your travis-ci configuration file and lints whether it is valid generic YAML before passing it to travis-ci's own linter.
Installation
It is recommended that you install the utility into either Virtualenv or Venv environment after which the following should install this utility:
$ pip install travislint
The travislint application can then be run to lint your travis-ci configuration file.
Usage
travislint [-h] [-v] [filename] Lint a .travis.yml file positional arguments: filename name of the file to lint (default: .travis.yml) optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit -v, --verbose verbose output of progress
Under the Covers
First of all we lint the file as generic YAML using yamllint.
It turns out that the travis-ci command line tool does not actually lint your file itself but hands off this task to a portion of the travis-ci website. So it was simple to do this using the Python requests package and save you from having to install Ruby etc.