Tilt: dev environment as code

#1

Post by saikatsg » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 7:14 PM UTC

Tilt: dev environment as code
github.com

Re: Tilt: dev environment as code

#2

Post by cirego » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 8:33 PM UTC

Interesting to see this pop up here! I’ve been using Tilt for multiple years now but the pace of development seems to have slowed down after the Docker acquisition.

I love how Tilt enables creating a local development environment that lets my services run the same in production , test and development. Greatly simplifies my service code and improved my quality.

In particular, I’d love to see Tilt be better around handling things like CRDs (there’s no way to mark a k8s_yaml as depending on a CRD being available, a frequent source of broken tilt up invocations).

Having said that, the first thing I do, when working on any new project, is to get “tilt up” working.

Things I’ve used for testing include: eBPF-based collectors for security and observability, data pipelines, helm chart development, and Kubernetes controllers. It’s very flexible and powerful for a wide range of development.

Re: Tilt: dev environment as code

#3

Post by kevmo314 » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 8:42 PM UTC

The pitch is kinda funny to me:

> Modern apps are made of too many services. They're everywhere and in constant communication.

So we made tooling to make it easier for you to make more of them!

Re: Tilt: dev environment as code

#4

Post by sigmonsays » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 8:58 PM UTC

i don't get the value of a tool like this.

Do we really struggle bringing up services as containers and applying kube configs?

For my development of services that run in kube, I don't dev with kube, you shouldn't have to. I also use docker-compose for most dev env services.

Perhaps i'm not developing the right kind of software. Whoever finds this type of tool useful, when would you use it?

Re: Tilt: dev environment as code

#5

Post by satvikpendem » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 8:58 PM UTC

Isn't this essentially dev containers?

Re: Tilt: dev environment as code

#6

Post by Kuraj » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 9:00 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #5

Isn't this essentially dev containers?

Yeah it would be really useful to have in the readme what kind of problems this solves that dev containers don't solve already

Re: Tilt: dev environment as code

#7

Post by Szpadel » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 9:11 PM UTC

sigmonsays wrote: post #4

i don't get the value of a tool like this. Do we really struggle bringing up services as containers and applying kube configs? For my development of services that run in kube, I don't dev with kube, you shouldn't have to. I also use docker-compose for most dev env services. Perhaps i'm not developing the right kind of software. Whoever finds this type of tool useful, when would you use it?

I never used tilt, but it looks very useful for anything that needs kube API to work, like some operator or something that needs to discover configuration from config maps.

otherwise I think it's meant for systems where system that you need for testing is to big to work on your local machine.

Re: Tilt: dev environment as code

#8

Post by Noumenon72 » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 9:15 PM UTC

sigmonsays wrote: post #4

i don't get the value of a tool like this. Do we really struggle bringing up services as containers and applying kube configs? For my development of services that run in kube, I don't dev with kube, you shouldn't have to. I also use docker-compose for most dev env services. Perhaps i'm not developing the right kind of software. Whoever finds this type of tool useful, when would you use it?

If you have sidecar containers that feed your regular containers, or you need to test a Dask KubeCluster, or deploy Helm charts, this kind of lets you work with the real lifecycle. Tilt is kinda better at watching for code changes in all your containers than docker-compose too, and has a nice UI to watch logs and see what succeeded or failed.

Re: Tilt: dev environment as code

#9

Post by p0w3n3d » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 9:22 PM UTC

Backdays we used to have

  # vim: ts=2 sw=2 et

And a shebang line

Re: Tilt: dev environment as code

#10

Post by cirego » Sat, Apr 26, 2025, 9:23 PM UTC

Noumenon72 wrote: post #8

sigmonsays wrote: post #4

i don't get the value of a tool like this. Do we really struggle bringing up services as containers and applying kube configs? For my development of services that run in kube, I don't dev with kube, you shouldn't have to. I also use docker-compose for most dev env services. Perhaps i'm not developing the right kind of software. Whoever finds this type of tool useful, when would you use it?

If you have sidecar containers that feed your regular containers, or you need to test a Dask KubeCluster, or deploy Helm charts, this kind of lets you work with the real lifecycle. Tilt is kinda better at watching for code changes in all your containers than docker-compose too, and has a nice UI to watch logs and see what succeeded or failed.

Tilt can also help validate things like:

- Service discovery

- Volume mounts

- Ingress and Certificates

- Metrics scraping and configuration

- Dashboards

It’s really quite powerful and replaces the need to mock things out with docker compose. If you’re deploying to Kubernetes, Tilt gives you the option to avoid “development-only” setups like docker compose.