Remove <url> requirement

❤️ this project and all the hard work that’s gone into it! /cc @paulirish et al

I’ve been writing some custom gatherers/audits recently and wanted to take that work further. Outside of www specific audits, I’d like to use lighthouse to test against local project-specifc files, assets, dependancies, apis, repos etc… The only issue I find is the requirement of a <url>. I can get passed this by simply providing a local/arbitrary value to the cli but I feel like its an anti-pattern (and I know Paul hates anti-patterns).

Examples of general-purpose gatherers I’d like to write:

• Github (organizations, members, repos, contents etc.)
• Sonarqube (code coverage)
• Contentful (schemas, assets)
• lots more…

Examples of general-purpose audits I’d like to write/run:

• Source code/file analysis (linting, standards, best practices, coverage etc.)
• Maintainability (repository health checks, templates, licensing, versioning etc.)
• Performance (local, staging & prod build metrics)
• lots more…

Why?

I see a ton of value in the way lighthouse is architected (ie. collecting > auditing > scoring) and would prefer not to have 2, 3, 4, 5 different testing/auditing tools to create a dashboard of insights (plus, the lighthouse dashboard is really 🌶).

Along these lines, some discussion (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/issues/1806) and work (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/pull/3743) have been done in this space around the separation of the audit and gatherer phases (GAAAAr!); I can definitely see a lot more use cases from the community (of the CLI tool) if the underlaying architecture was to be more exposed, talked about & emphasized.

What?

• Make lighthouse <url>-agnostic

How?

• Remove <url> as a requirement and/or
• Create a flag (ex. lighthouse --disable-driver)

Would love to know others thoughts/feelings here.

[paulirish]

Looks like sonar enabled this workflow. Check out “Easily extend sonarwhal with parsers to analyze files such as config files” on https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/04/19/sonarwhal-v1-linting-tool-for-web/

[darcyclarke]

@paulirish thanks for the update/tip here Paul! Will check this out for sure.