Actually, I know how I missed the buildfs command. It’s not listed anywhere on the espressif docs page: Espressif 8266 — PlatformIO v6.1 documentation
buildfs works locally but when I run it on travis I get the error Do not know how to make File target buildfs’` I get this error even if I ensure spiffs package is installed
$ platformio platform install espressif8266 --with-package tool-mkspiffs
What else needs to be installed for buildfs to work?