Vincenzo Scamporlino
41 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
41 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
---
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title: Introducing Lighthouse for Backstage
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author: Paul Marbach, Spotify
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authorURL: http://twitter.com/fastfrwrd
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authorImageURL: https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1224058798958088192/JPxS8uzR_400x400.jpg
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---
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We’re proud to announce that our first internal plugin at Spotify has been open-sourced as part of Backstage. This plugin works with the newly open-sourced [lighthouse-audit-service](https://github.com/spotify/lighthouse-audit-service) to run and track Lighthouse audits for your websites.
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{/* truncate */}
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## What is Lighthouse?
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Google's [Lighthouse](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse) auditing tool for websites is a great open-source resource for benchmarking and improving the accessibility, performance, SEO, and best practices of your site.
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At Spotify, we keep track of Lighthouse audit scores over time to look at trends and areas for investment. We particularly look to Lighthouse to give us [accessibility recommendations](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/v3/scoring#a11y); in the next few months, we plan to roll out Lighthouse accessibility category scores as a benchmark metric for all websites at Spotify.
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## Lighthouse, tracked over time
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What makes the plugin unique is that we can track a website's audit performance over time using the main metrics that Lighthouse outputs, rather than simply running reports. The sparklines show, at a glance, how all of your websites are holding up over recent builds.
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Lighthouse reports can be viewed directly in Backstage, with the ability to travel back and forth through your audit history, so you can quickly diagnose which release caused a performance or SEO regression.
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Trigger an audit directly from Backstage, or trigger audits programmatically with your new lighthouse-audit-service instance. Schedule them after builds as a sort of smoke test, or trigger them on a schedule (as we do at Spotify) to get a daily snapshot of your website.
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## Using Lighthouse in Backstage
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To learn how you can enable Lighthouse auditing within Backstage, head over to the [README](https://github.com/backstage/community-plugins/tree/main/workspaces/lighthouse/plugins/lighthouse) for the plugin to get started.
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## A personal note
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I want to thank the folks on the Backstage team for approaching me to open-source this plugin. I have found working on Backstage to be a really rewarding and fun time, and I'm so glad that the core team members have put in the effort to make Backstage something that anyone in the industry can use. I can't wait to play with all the plugins the community is going to create. I am hopeful that this plugin can help illustrate just a sliver of what we use Backstage for at Spotify.
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