Axe - A performance tool to help you cut down your load time

What is it?

Axe is an application that gives you statistics and charts on the performance of pages on your site, based on metrics from WebpageTest.org.

How does it work?

The user can add a list of URLs which he/she wants performance analytics for. The app stores these URLs and runs performance tests on them daily, using a private instance of WebPageTest.org. These tests test for multiple connection types as well as for desktop and mobile agents. Using the app, the user can fetch statistics and charts about the performance of the individual pages that are being tested, as well as gain information on the average performance analytics (Quick Stats) of certain categories (i.e. wildcard routes).

Installation

Requirements

Since Axe is built on top of WebpageTest.org, you must have a private instance of WebpageTest.org set up. Also, you must have Node.js, NPM, and Postgres installed.

Configuration Options (config.json)

The following are settings that can be configured in the config.json file.

wptBaseURL: (String, Required) The base URL for your private instance of WebpageTest (without slash at the end)

AxeBaseURL: (String, Required) The base URL for your deployed instance of Axe. Axe has to be running on a publicly accessible web server, since it will be pinged by the WebpageTest instance

wptAPIKey: (String, Required) The API key for your WebpageTest instance

quickStatsRoutes: (Object, Required) A dictionary mapping a Quick Stats category name to its URL. To gather Quick Stats on a wildcard URL, use * as a wildcard character.

emailAddresses: (Array) The list of emails that notifications about exceeding page limits should be sent to.

maxPageSize: (Float) Email notifications will be sent daily for any pages that have a page size in kB greater than this number.

Installing

Note: Axe has to be hosted on a publicly accessible server for tests to be logged!

1. Run npm install && bower install to install the required dependencies.
2. Set an environment variable DATABASE_URL to your Postgres database URL (postgres://username:password@host:port/dbname).
3. Run ./bin/createDB to create the DB tables. If this doesn't work, make sure that the bin/createDB is executable by running chmod +x bin/createDB.
4. Set up a cronjob or, if your Axe instance is hosted on Heroku, use Scheduler to run bin/runTests once a day.
5. Setup another cronjob to run bin/reRunFailedTests once a day, preferably a few hours after the runTests cronjob has run, to retest any tests that failed to run for some reason.
6. (Optional) Setup a final cronjob to run bin/pageSizeNotification once a day, to send an email alert daily with any URLs that had a page size greater than the maxPageSize specified in config.json.