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Tilt: dev environment as code

(github.com)
136 points saikatsg | 2 comments | 26 Apr 25 19:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.439s | source
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sigmonsays ◴[26 Apr 25 20:58 UTC] No.43807159[source]▶
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?

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1. dharmab ◴[26 Apr 25 22:24 UTC] No.43807754[source]▶
Our team switched from Docker Compose (without Kubernetes) to Tilt for a distributed systems development environment. (Think platform engineering work on a system that scales from zero to several hundred thousand instances). Our time to go from code change to testable, running code on our laptops went from about a minute to a couple of seconds, using some Tiltfile recipes to do automatic incremental recompilation on our host laptops as we edit source files, and live-reload the new artifacts into running Kubernetes containers. The reload happens so fast that we configured our environment to compile+deploy+run on save, and the new code is already running by the time you reach for the "run tests" button.

I think if you told our team to go back to Docker Compose they'd revolt on the spot haha

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2. sigmonsays ◴[01 May 25 20:13 UTC] No.43862830[source]▶
tilt might be nice but I do not develop in containers or kubernetes. Tilt to me looks like more glue on top to make updating kube fast. It might make sense for some but it seems pointless to me.

If I can run external dependencies in docker locally, I can setup my app to run entirely from my laptop. That's all docker-compose does, just runs dev deps like DBs and other services i'm not editing code of.

As far as code reloading goes, there is a million tools to do that already. Go already compiles locally much faster than seconds.

All that being said, why are people choosing to develop in containers/kubernetes?

Maybe apps that need to be more tightly integrated with kube would benefit from this?