Support production monitoring use case, no git required

[patrickhulce]

Currently every build needs a .hash but we don't necessarily need one. We could switch to a .projectVersion and support timestamps instead?

[patrickhulce]

New better idea: report command just accepts a --hash-method flag of either git or timestamp which would do Date.now().toString(16) to generate a timestamp hash instead

[patrickhulce]

we're punting on non-git cases for MVP

[thasmo]

@patrickhulce Does that mean in general, that lighthouse-ci will work without a project's git repository when using a timestamp based versioning? It would be nice to just run lhci autorun with a config and send the results to the server; without the need for a local git repository at all. (e.g. it would make it possible to create regular snapshot reports for specific URLs without the need to run it in a git repo or ci environment)

[patrickhulce]

it would make it possible to create regular snapshot reports for specific URLs without the need to run it in a git repo or ci environment

This broader effort we refer to as "production monitoring" which is on our roadmap but requires many subtle but important changes to the types of UI and assumptions made in the CI server currently. We're discussing internally exactly how we want to handle this.

[AaronLayton]

Just placing my support behind this Issue

[Zizzamia]

@patrickhulce would this be just a new Project under the current UI?
Something like https://lhci-server.lovelhci.com/app/projects/my-app-prod?
One point I have been thinking, is also how we could adapt the UI for running different experiments, I will open a different issue for that conversation.

[patrickhulce]

@Zizzamia yeah you can basically do a new project and fake the build context to get this to work today.

Something like the below (copied from #225)

export LHCI_BUILD_CONTEXT__CURRENT_HASH=$(node -p "new Date().getTime().toString(16).split('').reverse().join('')")
export LHCI_BUILD_CONTEXT__COMMIT_TIME=$(date --iso-8601=seconds)
export LHCI_BUILD_CONTEXT__CURRENT_BRANCH=master
export LHCI_BUILD_CONTEXT__COMMIT_MESSAGE="Periodic run "
export LHCI_BUILD_CONTEXT__AUTHOR="No one <noreply@example.com>"
export LHCI_BUILD_CONTEXT__AVATAR_URL="https://picsum.photos/id/237/200/200"
lhci ...