Tilt Development Environment

Automatic Reload Behaviors

Tilt live-reloads aggressively. Never suggest restarting tilt up or manually refreshing resources—Tilt handles this automatically in nearly all cases.

What Reloads Automatically

When Restart IS Actually Needed

Restarting tilt up is required only for:

• Tilt version upgrades
• Changing Tilt's port or host settings
• Recovering from Tilt crashes
• Kubernetes context changes (switching clusters)

Verifying Updates Applied

Instead of restarting, verify updates propagated:

# Check resource status after saving
tilt get uiresource/<name> -o json | jq '.status.updateStatus'

# Watch for update completion
tilt wait --for=condition=Ready uiresource/<name> --timeout=60s

# Check recent logs for reload confirmation
tilt-logs <resource> --since 1m
tilt-logs <resource> --since 5m | rg -i "reload|restart|updated|synced"

Instructions

• Use tilt get uiresources -o json to query resource status programmatically
• Use tilt get uiresource/<name> -o json for detailed single resource state
• Use tilt-logs CLI for log retrieval (preferred over tilt logs)
• Use tilt trigger <resource> to force updates when auto-reload didn't trigger
• Use tilt wait to block until resources reach ready state
• For Tiltfile authoring, see @TILTFILE_API.md
• For complete CLI reference with JSON parsing patterns, see @CLI_REFERENCE.md

Quick Reference

Check Resource Status

tilt get uiresources -o json | jq '.items[] | {name: .metadata.name, runtime: .status.runtimeStatus, update: .status.updateStatus}'

Wait for Resource Ready

tilt wait --for=condition=Ready uiresource/<name> --timeout=120s

Get Resource Logs

tilt-logs <resource>              # Current logs
tilt-logs <resource> --since 5m   # Logs from last 5 minutes
tilt-logs <resource> --tail 100   # Last 100 lines

Trigger Update

tilt trigger <resource>

Lifecycle Commands

tilt up        # Start Tilt
tilt down      # Stop and clean up
tilt ci        # CI/batch mode

Resource Status Values

• RuntimeStatus: unknown, none, pending, ok, error, not_applicable
• UpdateStatus: none, pending, in_progress, ok, error, not_applicable

References

• Tilt Documentation: https://docs.tilt.dev/
• CLI Reference: https://docs.tilt.dev/cli/tilt.html
• Tiltfile API: https://docs.tilt.dev/api.html
• Extensions: https://github.com/tilt-dev/tilt-extensions