You know, it's a common situation when just after the brand major release comes a small release with patches and bugfixes. Yeah, Codeception 1.5.1 has nothing to surprise you, still it's reommended to upgrade if you are running the phar vs composer issue. As we discovered with the help of alexshelkov, that Codeception packaged phar was trying to load PHP libraries from a local composer installation. So if you was trying phar version in project that already use composer, you may have seen strange errors.
This bug was fixed and last version 1.5.1, ready for download.
A simple improvement was introduced by DevMan. It allows you to execute Codeception from any directory if you set a path to config file with a -c parameter.
php codecept.phar run -c /var/myproject/codeception.yml
And finally we are back green on Travis. We had some issues with Travis infrastructure (not the tests), but we managed to solve them. Did you know that it takes 8 minutes to run all internal tests of Codeception? Yeah, we've got lots of tests )
Update
Please redownload your codeception.phar for update:
wget http://codeception.com/codecept.phar -O codecept.phar