We'd love your help! This doc covers how to become a contributor and submit code to the project.
We tag issues that are good candidates for those new to the code with good first issue
. We recommend you start there!
The .eslintrc.cjs
file defines all. We use JSDoc with TypeScript checkJs
. Annotations are encouraged for all contributions.
See Lighthouse Architecture, our overview and tour of the codebase.
If you have a contribution for our documentation, please submit it in the web.dev repo.
- Submit an issue describing your proposed change.
- The maintainers will respond to your issue promptly.
- If your proposed change is accepted, and you haven't already done so, sign a Contributor License Agreement (see details below).
- Fork the repo, develop and test your code changes.
- Ensure that your code adheres to the existing style in the sample to which you are contributing.
- Submit a pull request.
If you've submitted a number of significant patches, feel free to add yourself in a PR to the project's AUTHORS
file in the root of the repo to be recognized for your contributions!
If proposing a new audit for Lighthouse, see the new audit proposal guide and open an issue for discussion before starting.
A PR for a new audit or changing an existing audit almost always needs the following:
-
If new, add the audit to the default config file (or, rarely, one of the other config files) so Lighthouse will run it.
-
Unit tests: in the matching test file (e.g. tests for
lighthouse-core/audits/my-swell-audit.js
go inlighthouse-core/test/audits/my-swell-audit-test.js
). -
Smoke (end-to-end) tests: search through the existing test expectations to see if there's a logical place to add a check for your change, or (as a last resort) add a new smoke test.
-
Run
yarn update:sample-json
to update the sample Lighthouse result JSON kept in the repo for testing. This will also pull any strings needed for localization into the correct files.
Keep the description
of an audit as short as possible. When a reference doc for the audit exists on
developers.google.com/web, the description
should only explain why the user should care
about the audit, not how to fix it.
Do:
Serve images that are smaller than the user's viewport to save cellular data and
improve load time. [Learn more](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/oversized-images).
Don't:
Serve images that are smaller than the user's viewport to save cellular data and
improve load time. Consider using responsive images and client hints.
If no reference doc exists yet, then you can use the description
as a stopgap for explaining
both why the audit is important and how to fix it.
Gatherers have to interface with the inherently-complex real world and they also run while loading and/or testing the page, risking interfering with themselves. As a result, gatherers should strive to be as simple as possible and leave as much processing as possible to computed artifacts and audits.
It can be tempting to serialize the entire state of the world into the artifact the gatherer produces. Try to limit the artifact to exactly the information needed for current audits while leaving room for extensibility as needs change in the future.
A PR adding or changing a gatherer almost always needs to include the following:
-
If new, add the gatherer to the default config file (or, rarely, one of the other config files) so Lighthouse will run it.
-
Unit tests: gatherer execution often takes place mostly on the browser side, either through protocol functionality or executing javascript in the test page. This makes gatherers difficult to unit test without extensive mocking, ending up mostly exercising the mocks instead of the actual gatherer.
As a result, we mostly rely on smoke testing for gatherers. However, if there are parts of a gatherer that naturally lend themselves to unit testing, the new tests would go in the matching test file (e.g. tests for
lighthouse-core/gather/gatherers/reap.js
go inlighthouse-core/test/gather/gatherers/reap-test.js
). -
Smoke (end-to-end) tests: search through the existing test expectations to see if there's a logical place to add a check for your change, or (as a last resort) add a new smoke test if one is required.
It's most important to get true end-to-end coverage, so be sure that audits that consume the new gatherer output are in the expectations. Artifacts can also have expectations for those intermediate results.
-
Golden artifacts:
sample_v2.json
is generated from a set of artifacts that come from running LH againstdbw_tester.html
. Those artifacts likely need to be updated after gatherer changes withyarn update:sample-artifacts
, but limit to just the artifact being altered if possible. For example:# update just the ScriptElements artifact yarn update:sample-artifacts ScriptElements
This command works for updating
yarn update:sample-artifacts devtoolsLogs
ortraces
as well, but the resultingsample_v2.json
churn may be extensive and you might be better off editing manually. -
Run
yarn update:sample-json
to update the sample Lighthouse result JSON kept in the repo for testing. This will also pull any strings needed for localization into the correct files.
If there is an error in one of the proto tests (proto-test.js
or psi-test.js
), you may need to install protobuf
locally for debugging. See the instructions for installing and running in the proto readme.
If you are adding an image to a readme use the absolute path to the image for the specific commit hash where the image was introduced. This requires multiple commits.
- Make the commit to introduce the image.
- Get the absolute path to the image with the commit hash e.g.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/e7997b3db01de3553d8cb208a40f3d4fd350195c/assets/example_dev_tools.png
- Add to readme as an absolute reference to that image.
If you are updating an image that already exists: commit it, then update the readme to point the image with that new commits hash absolute url.
We're using conventional-commit for our commit messages. Since all PRs are squashed, we enforce this format for PR titles rather than individual git commits. A commitlint
bot will update the status of your PR based on the title's conformance. The expected format is:
type(scope): message subject
- The
type
must be one of:new_audit
core
tests
i18n
,docs
deps
report
cli
clients
misc
. (See.cz-config
) - The
scope
is optional, but recommended. Any string is allowed; it should indicate what the change affects. - The
message subject
should be pithy and direct.
The commitizen CLI can help to construct these commit messages.
We'd love to accept your sample apps and patches! Before we can take them, we have to jump a couple of legal hurdles.
Please fill out either the individual or corporate Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
- If you are an individual writing original source code and you're sure you own the intellectual property, then you'll need to sign an individual CLA.
- If you work for a company that wants to allow you to contribute your work, then you'll need to sign a corporate CLA.
Follow either of the two links above to access the appropriate CLA and instructions for how to sign and return it. Once we receive it, we'll be able to accept your pull requests.
We track our errors in the wild with Sentry. In general, do not worry about wrapping your audits or gatherers in try/catch blocks and reporting every error that could possibly occur; lighthouse-core/runner.js
and lighthouse-core/gather/gather-runner.js
already catch and report any errors that occur while running a gatherer or audit, including errors fatal to the entire run. However, there are some situations when you might want to explicitly handle an error and report it to Sentry or wrap it to avoid reporting. Generally, you can interact with Sentry simply by requiring the lighthouse-core/lib/sentry.js
file and call its methods. The module exports a delegate that will correctly handle the error reporting based on the user's opt-in preference and will simply no-op if they haven't so you don't need to check.
If you have an expected error that is recoverable but want to track how frequently it happens, use Sentry.captureException.
const Sentry = require('./lighthouse-core/lib/sentry');
try {
doRiskyThing();
} catch (err) {
Sentry.captureException(err, {
tags: {audit: 'audit-name'},
level: 'warning',
});
doFallbackThing();
}
If you need to track a code path that doesn't necessarily mean an error occurred, use Sentry.captureMessage.
NOTE: If the message you're capturing is dynamic/based on user data or you need a stack trace, then create a fake error instead and use Sentry.captureException
so that the instances will be grouped together in Sentry.
const Sentry = require('./lighthouse-core/lib/sentry');
if (networkRecords.length === 1) {
Sentry.captureMessage('Site only had 1 network request', {level: 'info'});
return null;
} else {
// do your thang
}
info
for events that don't indicate a bug but should be trackedwarning
for events that might indicate unexpected behavior but is recoverableerror
for events that caused an audit/gatherer failure but were not fatalfatal
for events that caused Lighthouse to exit early and not produce a report
The release guide.