Tilt

Tilt

First Action: Check for Errors

Before investigating issues or verifying deployments, check resource health:

# Find errors and pending resources (primary health check)
tilt get uiresources -o json | jq -r '.items[] | select(.status.runtimeStatus == "error" or .status.updateStatus == "error" or .status.updateStatus == "pending") | "\(.metadata.name): runtime=\(.status.runtimeStatus) update=\(.status.updateStatus)"'

# Quick status overview
tilt get uiresources -o json | jq '[.items[].status.updateStatus] | group_by(.) | map({status: .[0], count: length})'

Non-Default Ports

When Tilt runs on a non-default port, add --port:

tilt get uiresources --port 37035
tilt logs <resource> --port 37035

Resource Status

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

# Single resource detail
tilt get uiresource/<name> -o json

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

Status values:

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

Logs

tilt logs <resource>
tilt logs <resource> --since 5m
tilt logs <resource> --tail 100
tilt logs --json                    # JSON Lines output

Trigger and Lifecycle

tilt trigger <resource>             # Force update
tilt up                             # Start
tilt down                           # Stop and clean up

Running tilt up

Run in tmux to survive session reloads:

SESSION=$(basename $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null) || basename $PWD)

if ! tmux has-session -t "$SESSION" 2>/dev/null; then
  tmux new-session -d -s "$SESSION" -n tilt
  tmux send-keys -t "$SESSION:tilt" 'tilt up' Enter
elif ! tmux list-windows -t "$SESSION" -F '#{window_name}' | grep -q "^tilt$"; then
  tmux new-window -t "$SESSION" -n tilt
  tmux send-keys -t "$SESSION:tilt" 'tilt up' Enter
fi

Critical: Never Restart for Code Changes

Tilt live-reloads automatically. Never suggest restarting tilt up for:

• Tiltfile edits
• Source code changes
• Kubernetes manifest updates

Restart only for: Tilt version upgrades, port/host changes, crashes, cluster context switches.

References

• TILTFILE_API.md - Tiltfile authoring
• CLI_REFERENCE.md - Complete CLI with JSON patterns
• https://docs.tilt.dev/