I’m following the instructions here, and it’s fine for local builds:
https://docs.cocos2d-x.org/creator/manual/en/publish/publish-in-command-line.html
However, we have a client who insists on using CircleCI for builds, and we may have to move away from Cocos Creator if we can’t find a solution. Has there been any progress on disconnecting the build process from the IDE?
I’m really not looking forward to losing a paying client over this.
We don’t support Linux at this time and the editor is needed…i.e there is no pure command-line build process. So you could do a CLI build on Mac or Windows but not Linux.
There are a few users that have a Docker image of Creator, but I don’t know if it has been updated for 2.1.1. Cocos Creator 1.9 unofficial Linux release and Docker image
Any idea if pure virtual builds are on the roadmap? I didn’t realize it would be this big of a deal-breaker but evidently it is 
We don’t currently support the editor on Linux and we don’t have a plan to in the near future. I haven’t heard that there is a plan to decouple the building process from the editor yet.
you could install a windows vm on your linux, install cc and build on the virtual windows, etc. should work fine.
Yup. I imagine though that if this is a build server they may not have a GUI running. OP can decide what works for them
I don’t really have any control over those things in the tiny VM that circleci gives you.
Can you share this VM by chance or is it proprietary?
there seems to be some win support in some of their plans: https://github.com/CircleCI-Public/windows-preview-docs
alternatively, i think (but i’m no build process specialist), you could use a private windows docker image (with CC installed on it and perhaps a win ssh server) and connect to it/execute the build using something like rsh.