So it turns out Travis supports xvfb which will do nicely. One just has to add the following lines to their travis.yml before_script: section
- "export DISPLAY=:99.0"
- "sh -e /etc/init.d/xvfb start"
- sleep 3 # give xvfb some time to start
Thanks for asking that Tom, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it!