Collect method "psi": should it throw "Chrome installation not found"?

As far as I understood, while using the PageSpeed API (--collect.method=psi), the tests would run in Google’s cloud instead of trying to find an instance of Chrome on my local environment and run (which motivated me to generate an API token in my Google Cloud account and favour this method, so I don’t need to run it on my CI, implying I don’t need to have Chrome installed on my CI environments).

Did I miss something or this is indeed a bug?

NOTE: Not even using LHCITEST_IGNORE_CHROME_INSTALLATIONS (an option I found being used in an automated test for the healthcheck script made the check to be skipped (but maybe it just works if I call healthcheck explicitly, which is not the case - using autorun)

Context:

• Relates to: #340
• Version used: 0.4.4
• Command used: lhci autorun --config=./lighthouse-ci.config.json --collect.url=https://some/url/with/index.html --collect.numberOfRuns=1 --collect.settings.chromeFlags=--no-sandbox --collect.settings.emulatedFormFactor=desktop --collect.settings.onlyCategories=["performance", "accessibility", "best-practices"] --collect.method=psi --collect.psiApiKey=some-token
• Config used:

{
  "ci": {
    "assert": {
      "assertions": {
        "resource-summary:document:size": ["error", {"maxNumericValue": 2200}],
        "resource-summary:stylesheet:size": ["error", {"maxNumericValue": 15000}],
        "resource-summary:font:size": ["error", {"maxNumericValue": 105000}],
        "resource-summary:image:size": ["error", {"maxNumericValue": 377006}],
        "resource-summary:script:size": ["error", {"maxNumericValue": 500000}]
      }
    },
    "upload": {
      "ignoreDuplicateBuildFailure": true,
      "urlReplacementPatterns": ["s#/[a-f0-9]+/#/#"],
      "serverBaseUrl": "http://some/server:9001/",
      "githubApiHost": "https://github.com/api/v3"
    }
  }
}

[Kosai106]

Here’s what the CircleCI job looks like currently, including the workaround.

frontend-lighthouse-check:
    <<: *defaults
    docker:
      - image: cimg/node:16.13.0
    parallelism: 5
    steps:
      - checkout
      - inject-bash-helpers
      - *inject-yarn-deps
      # -- Chrome install needed to prevent error
      - browser-tools/install-chrome
      - browser-tools/install-chromedriver
      # -- End Chrome install
      - run:
          name: Run Lighthouse CI
          command: |
            yarn global add @lhci/cli@0.9.x
            lhci autorun --collect.method=psi --collect.psiApiKey=${GOOGLE_PSI_KEY} --collect.settings.emulatedFormFactor=desktop --headful=false

[patrickhulce]

Ah, you’re right @yuriteixeira the Chrome installation healthcheck shouldn’t apply when you’re using the PSI collect method 👍

It’s a bug we’ll fix thanks very much for filing! 😃