Tilt is a tool that enables rapid iterative development of containerized workloads.
Here is an example workflow without Tilt for modifying some source code and testing those changes in a cluster:
- Modify the source code.
- Build the container image.
- Either push the image to a registry or load it into your kind cluster.
- Deploy all the appropriate Kubernetes manifests for your application.
- Or, if this is an update, you'd instead scale the Deployment to 0 replicas, scale back to 1, and wait for the new pod to be running.
This process can take minutes, depending on how long each step takes.
Here is the same workflow with Tilt:
- Run
tilt up
- Modify the source code
- Wait for Tilt to update the container with your changes
This ends up taking a fraction of the time, sometimes on the order of a few seconds!
Follow Tilt's instructions for installation.
You must install the tilt-support repo at the directory level above this repo
pushd ..
git clone https://github.com/operator-framework/tilt-support
popd
This is typically as short as:
tilt up
NOTE: if you are using Podman, at least as of v4.5.1, you need to do this:
DOCKER_BUILDKIT=0 tilt up
Otherwise, you'll see an error when Tilt tries to build your image that looks similar to:
Build Failed: ImageBuild: stat /var/tmp/libpod_builder2384046170/build/Dockerfile: no such file or directory
When Tilt starts, you'll see something like this in your terminal:
Tilt started on http://localhost:10350/
v0.33.1, built 2023-06-28
(space) to open the browser
(s) to stream logs (--stream=true)
(t) to open legacy terminal mode (--legacy=true)
(ctrl-c) to exit
Typically, you'll want to press the space bar to have it open the UI in your web browser.
Shortly after starting, Tilt processes the Tiltfile
, resulting in:
- Building the go binaries
- Building the images
- Loading the images into kind
- Running kustomize and applying everything except the Deployments that reference the images above
- Modifying the Deployments to use the just-built images
- Creating the Deployments
Any time you change any of the files listed in the deps
section in the <binary name>_binary
local_resource
,
Tilt automatically rebuilds the go binary. As soon as the binary is rebuilt, Tilt pushes it (and only it) into the
appropriate running container, and then restarts the process.