Unlighthouse

Unlighthouse solves a specific limitation of running Google Lighthouse manually: Lighthouse audits one page at a time, but most site audits need coverage across an entire site. Unlighthouse crawls a site, applies smart sampling so large sites don’t require auditing every single page exhaustively, and runs Lighthouse across the resulting set, presenting results in a modern dashboard rather than Lighthouse’s default single-page report.

The project is a pnpm monorepo split into core (crawling and Lighthouse orchestration), cli, client (the dashboard UI), server, the main unlighthouse package, and a separate unlighthouse-ci package for running the same scans inside a CI pipeline. A crux-api package integrates Chrome UX Report data, adding real-world field performance metrics alongside Lighthouse’s lab-based scores.

MIT licensed with minimal configuration required, Unlighthouse is run via npx unlighthouse --site <your-site> and requires no account, backend service, or paid tier — it’s a local CLI tool that happens to render its output as a rich web dashboard.

What You Get

• Whole-site Lighthouse auditing via a single CLI command, instead of running Lighthouse manually per page
• Smart sampling so large sites get representative coverage without auditing every page exhaustively
• A modern dashboard UI for browsing and comparing results across the whole site
• A dedicated CI package (unlighthouse-ci) for running the same audits inside a pipeline

Common Use Cases

• Auditing site-wide performance, accessibility, SEO, and best-practices scores before a launch or major release
• Catching site-wide Core Web Vitals regressions in CI before they reach production
• Getting a dashboard view of Lighthouse scores across hundreds of pages instead of running Lighthouse manually per URL
• Combining lab-based Lighthouse scores with real-world Chrome UX Report field data for a fuller performance picture

Under The Hood

Architecture Unlighthouse is a pnpm monorepo with core owning the crawling, sampling, and Lighthouse orchestration logic, server and client implementing the local dashboard (server serving results, client rendering the UI), and cli wrapping it all into the npx unlighthouse entry point. unlighthouse-ci is a separate package built on the same core specifically for pipeline use, and crux-api isolates the Chrome UX Report integration as its own concern rather than mixing field data fetching into the core scanning logic.

Tech Stack JavaScript/Node.js (requiring Node >= 22.18.0), built on Google Lighthouse and Puppeteer for page auditing and crawling, packaged as an npm CLI with a pnpm workspace for the monorepo, and Vitest for testing.

Code Quality A dedicated test/ directory with Vitest configuration and very active, consistently maintained commit history (per GitHub activity metrics) reflect an actively developed tool maintained largely by a single well-known open-source maintainer (harlan-zw) with a sponsor-funded development model.

What Makes It Unique Rather than wrapping Lighthouse with minimal changes, Unlighthouse adds site-wide crawling with smart sampling and a purpose-built dashboard on top — turning a single-page auditing tool into a whole-site auditing workflow without needing to script Lighthouse runs manually across every URL.

Self-Hosting

Licensing Model MIT licensed — the full CLI, dashboard, and CI package are open source and free with no license key.

Self-Hosting Restrictions None; Unlighthouse runs entirely locally or in CI as a CLI tool with no hosted backend or account requirement.

License Key Required No.