Tilt

Tilt is an open-source developer toolkit for building microservice applications, aimed at teams whose services run locally, in Kubernetes, or both. Developers describe their dev environment as code in a file called a Tiltfile, using Starlark-style functions such as k8s_yaml() to declare which YAML to deploy, docker_build() to declare which images to build from which directories, and k8s_resource() to configure port-forwards and resource labels. A single `tilt up` command starts the whole application; Tilt then watches files for edits, rebuilds container images, and applies changes to keep the running environment up to date, positioned as a replacement for manual `docker build && kubectl apply` or `docker-compose up` loops.

The product organizes its capabilities around three areas: understanding and orchestrating services, faster iteration wherever code runs, and team-based productivity. Features include a web UI that surfaces all components of an app along with logs, broken builds and runtime errors; live_update, which pushes code into already-running containers in seconds rather than rebuilding images, including for compiled languages and changed dependencies; custom triggers for tasks such as seeding databases or creating infrastructure; build caching and Kubernetes-aware scripting; Snapshots for sharing a dev environment state to collaborate on issues; and usage analytics intended to help teams identify slowdowns. Tilt ships a broad CLI (tilt up, down, ci, logs, get, describe, apply, patch, snapshot, doctor, demo, lsp, and alpha commands, among others) and a language server for Starlark.

Tilt is distributed as a single static binary for macOS, Linux and Windows via one-step install scripts or package managers including Homebrew, Scoop, Conda Forge and asdf, and it can also be built from source (requiring Go and TypeScript/JavaScript tooling). It requires Docker, kubectl and a local Kubernetes cluster; documentation covers Docker Desktop, Kind with a local registry via ctlptl, and MicroK8s as cluster options.

Business model

Tilt is distributed as free, open-source software under the Apache License 2.0, with the core engine, CLI and web UI in a public GitHub repository. Alongside the open-source tool, the site describes team-oriented capabilities such as shared dev-environment snapshots, codified best practices for reproducible onboarding, and analytics on developer-experience metrics.

Traction

The tilt-dev/tilt GitHub repository has roughly 10,000 stars, 413 forks, 44 watchers and more than 5,000 commits. The project publishes tagged releases, with installation documentation referencing version 0.37.7 across macOS, Linux and Windows binaries.