Pimp your Pipeline with Lighthouse CI

How to get Lighthouse into your release process

In the world of Web Development, since as far back as I can remember, two topics that continuously reoccur are performance and best practices. Tools like Lighthouse make it really easy to understand these areas by surfacing key metrics and suggesting guidelines on how to improve.

But running the occasional audit on your site will only get you so far. Of course, it’s good if you can get your scores above 90, but how are you maintaining those scores? Are you running a report after every deployment to make sure you’re still in the green? What if you could prevent a detrimental deployment from happening at all…

Enter, Lighthouse CI!

Lighthouse CI is a fantastic suite of tools, maintained by the friendly folks at Google, that can do things like…

• Run Lighthouse audits on your app via the command line
• Fail and report on any scores that don’t meet given thresholds
• Graph and compare your scores over time, tying each report to a commit

In this article, I’ll run through my implementation of Lighthouse CI in Azure DevOps and hopefully inspire a few others to do something similar.