Lighthouse CI (LHCI) is Google's official tool for running Lighthouse audits in continuous integration pipelines. It catches performance regressions before they reach production.

What is Lighthouse CI?

Lighthouse CI is a suite of tools that integrate Lighthouse into your CI/CD workflow:

• @lhci/cli — Command-line tool for running audits (~2M monthly npm downloads)
• @lhci/server — Optional server for storing historical data
• GitHub App — Status checks on pull requests

Why Use Lighthouse CI?

83% of Fortune 500 companies have integrated automated performance testing into their CI/CD pipelines. Without it, regressions slip through:

1. Developer fixes performance issues
2. PR gets merged
3. Next week, someone adds a 500KB image
4. Performance tanks, nobody notices until users complain

LHCI solves this by running Lighthouse on every commit and failing builds that don't meet your standards.

Key Features

• Regression prevention — Fail builds when Core Web Vitals like LCP, CLS, and TBT (proxy for INP) drop
• Performance budgets — Set thresholds for scores and resource sizes
• Historical tracking — Compare builds over time
• Variance reduction — Run multiple times, use median results
• GitHub integration — Status checks and PR comments

Quick Start

Install and run:

npm install -g @lhci/cli
lhci autorun --collect.url=https://example.com --upload.target=temporary-public-storage

Or with a config file (lighthouserc.js):

export default {
  ci: {
    collect: {
      url: ['https://example.com/'],
    },
    upload: {
      target: 'temporary-public-storage',
    },
  },
}

Then run:

lhci autorun

Setting Up Lighthouse Continuous Integration

Getting Lighthouse into your CI pipeline takes four steps: install @lhci/cli, add a config file with your URLs and budgets, wire it into your CI workflow (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.), and optionally connect the LHCI server for historical tracking. The tutorials below walk through each platform in detail.

How It Works

The lhci autorun command executes three steps:

1. collect — Runs Lighthouse N times per URL
2. assert — Checks results against budgets/assertions
3. upload — Stores results (temporary storage, filesystem, or LHCI server)

Run lhci healthcheck --fatal separately to verify Chrome and config before autorun.

Results are saved to .lighthouseci/ locally.

What LHCI Measures

Lighthouse CI audits four categories on every run:

• Performance — Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, TBT as proxy for INP) and other speed metrics
• Accessibility — Screen reader support, color contrast, ARIA
• SEO — Meta tags, structured data, mobile-friendliness
• Best Practices — HTTPS, console errors, deprecated APIs

Each category gets a 0-100 score. Set thresholds in your config to block merges when scores drop.

Prerequisites

• Node.js 18+
• Chrome/Chromium installed
• A URL to test (can be localhost with startServerCommand)

Tutorials

Performance Impact

Why invest in performance testing? Research shows direct business impact:

• BBC loses 10% of users for every additional second of load time
• Amazon estimates every 100ms of latency costs 1% in sales
• Google research shows bounce probability increases 90% as load time goes from 1s to 5s

Resources

• GitHub Repository
• Official Documentation
• npm Package