The examples for Github actions are missing chrome install

Author: PGradCreated Apr 2, 2023Updated Mar 3, 2026

Describe the bug The Github action examples from the official Lighthouse CI documentation simply do not work because they are missing the extra step of installing chrome.

To Reproduce Install the Lighthouse Github app to your repo. Copy and paste the example Github action from here and try running it in pre-flight or with nektos/act.

It will fail because Chrome has not been installed:

| ✅  .lighthouseci/ directory writable
| ✅  Configuration file found
| ❌  Chrome installation not found
| ⚠️   GitHub token not set
| Healthcheck failed!

Expected behavior The github action will succeed and you'll see Lighthouse statuses in your pre-flight that look like this (based on the link above): github_pr_results

It is true that the Troubleshooting section describes how to fix the issue, but it seems like a bad user experience (and a source of a lot of unnecessary Github issues) if every person who runs the example will run into this problem and need to troubleshoot it anew. Why can't @lhci/cli be like puppeteer and install its own version of chrome?

Even in the your own CI tests, you have the additional step of setting CHROME_PATH which is not described in the example.

Environment (please complete the following information):

  • @lhci/cli version 11.x

Source: GoogleChrome/lighthouse-ci