LHCI

LHCI, short for Lighthouse CI, is an open-source suite of tools that enables running Lighthouse audits in continuous integration (CI) environments, storing the results, and tracking performance over time. It extends the Lighthouse tooling to automated workflows, allowing teams to verify performance budgets and detect regressions across builds.

The suite comprises a server component that hosts a results dashboard and a storage backend, and a command-line interface used in CI pipelines. Core commands include collect, upload, and assert. Collect runs Lighthouse audits and saves the results locally or to a configured server; upload sends those results to the LHCI server; assert compares results against defined performance budgets and can fail a build if budgets are not met.

Usage typically involves configuring a CI job to execute collection against a set of URLs, optionally with budgets defined in an LHCI configuration. The server stores all audit results, enabling historical trend analysis through a web dashboard. Users can compare current audits to baselines to identify regressions in key metrics such as First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive, Speed Index, and Cumulative Layout Shift.

LHCI is part of the Lighthouse project ecosystem and is maintained as an open-source tool. It supports integration with common CI systems and hosting options for the results dashboard, facilitating long-term performance monitoring for web applications and enabling teams to automate performance governance across releases.