Introduction

Unlighthouse CI enables automated performance monitoring in continuous integration pipelines. Set performance budgets, generate reports, and catch regressions before they reach production.

Install

Unlighthouse aims to keep the installation size small, for this reason it depends natively on your locally installed chrome.

To use Unlighthouse in a CI context, you'll need to install puppeteer alongside the cli.

npm install -g @unlighthouse/cli puppeteer
# yarn global add @unlighthouse/cli puppeteer
# pnpm install -g @unlighthouse/cli puppeteer

Usage

Reporting

You may want to generate reports that can be consumed by other tools. To do you can use the reporter options:

• jsonSimple or json - A simple JSON report which contains the URL and top level scores. This is the default.
• jsonExpanded - A full JSON report which contains the URL, score, metric and category breakdowns.
• csv - A simple CSV report which contains the URL and score.
• csvExpanded - A full CSV report which contains the URL, score, metric and category breakdowns.
• lighthouseServer - Uploads the report to your lhci server
• false - Don't generate a report.

You can specify the reporter option with the --reporter flag or the ci.reporter config option.

# Run the CI with a CSV report
unlighthouse-ci --site <your-site> --reporter csv

# Run the CI with an expanded JSON report
unlighthouse-ci --site <your-site> --reporter jsonExpanded

import { defineUnlighthouseConfig } from 'unlighthouse/config'

export default defineUnlighthouseConfig({
  ci: {
    reporter: 'lighthouseServer',
  },
})

Budget assertions

Unlighthouse simplifies budget assertions. You can provide a single budget number which will be used to validate all pages and on all selected categories.

# Run the CI with a budget, will fail if any pages report any category less than 50
unlighthouse-ci --site <your-site> --budget 50

Alternatively, you can provide a configuration file with a list of budgets for each category.

export default defineUnlighthouseConfig({
  site: 'https://example.com',
  ci: {
    budget: {
      'performance': 50,
      'accessibility': 100,
      'best-practices': 90,
      'seo': 90,
    },
  },
})

# Run in the directory the unlighthouse.config.ts is in
unlighthouse-ci

Build static report

Examples

• https://vue-demo.unlighthouse.dev/
• https://inspect.unlighthouse.dev/

Pass the --build-static flag to the binary to generate the static files needed to host the report.

# NPM
unlighthouse-ci --site harlanzw.com --debug --build-static

This will generate files in your outputPath (.unlighthouse by default).

You can upload the directory client to a static host from there.

Configuration

Configuring the CLI can be done either through the CI arguments or through a config file.

CI Options

Config File

If you want to configure Unlighthouse, you can create a unlighthouse.config.ts file in your cwd.

import { defineUnlighthouseConfig } from 'unlighthouse/config'

export default defineUnlighthouseConfig({
  site: 'example.com',
  debug: true,
  scanner: {
    device: 'desktop',
  },
})

See the Configuration section for more details and the guides.

Github Actions & Netlify Example

This example is for Github Actions and deploys a static client build to Netlify.

name: Assertions and static report

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  demo:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0

      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: npm install -g @unlighthouse/cli puppeteer netlify-cli

      - name: Unlighthouse assertions and client
        run: unlighthouse-ci --site <your-site> --budget 75 --build-static

      - name: Deploy
        run: netlify deploy --dir=.unlighthouse --prod --message="New Release Deploy from GitHub Actions"
        env:
          NETLIFY_AUTH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.NETLIFY_AUTH_TOKEN }}
          NETLIFY_SITE_ID: ${{ secrets.NETLIFY_SITE_ID }}