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Debugging File Changes: Rebuilds and Ignores

Tilt watches your file system, and rebuilds any resources that have changed.

But what do you do when a file changes, but Tilt does the wrong thing?

This page should help you understand when file changes trigger builds, and when they don’t.

Basic Principles

1) When Tilt builds a resource, it should print which file changes triggered that build.

2) When a file changes that you don’t have control over, Tilt should not do a rebuild.

3) We optimize the syntax so that it’s easy to ignore spurious file changes, and hard to watch too much.

Watching Files


Tilt will always watch the Tiltfile. If the Tiltfile changes, Tilt will re-execute it. Most notably, this re-runs any local() calls.

When it’s finished, it will diff all the docker_build() and k8s_yaml() configurations, and only rebuild the ones that have changed.

How Tilt watches new files

Most Tiltfile built-in functions will automatically set up watches for the files they read. If those files change, they re-run the Tiltfile.

This includes helm(), load(), and read_file().

If your Tiltfile contains a local() call that reads from a file, Tilt has no way to know what file it reads. You can tell it to watch additional files with the watch_file() function.

Image Builds

When you include a docker_build() in your Tiltfile, you give Tilt a directory to build. Tilt will watch the entire directory.

Whenever a file in that directory changes, Tilt will re-build the image, then deploy any Kubernetes resources that depend on that image.

Ignoring Files


Tilt will always ignore changes under the .git directory.

When you use docker_build() in your Tiltfile, Tilt will remove .git from the Docker context.

Editor temp files

Tilt has a hard-coded list of temp files in common text editors (Emacs, Vim, etc.).

As devtools developers outselves, we want to be able to add hidden files to the repo, and not have those hidden files affect other devtools. For example, we don’t think Emacs developers wanted their temp files to break Docker caching. Lots of users get confused when this happens, because it’s not a file they control.

If you find that temp files in your editor trigger builds, please file a bug and we will add it to the list.

These temp files are still included in Docker build contexts by default.


Any docker_build commands will respect the .dockerignore file in their build directory. Learn more about .dockerignore in the Dockerfile reference.

For all docker_build commands in this directory, files that match these patterns will not trigger rebuilds, and will be excluded from the Docker build context.

docker_build and ignore=

For large multi-service repos, you may have multiple docker_build()s in the same directory. With the ignore= parameter, you can add image-specific ignore patterns.

For this specific docker_build() call, files that match these patterns will not trigger rebuilds, and will be excluded from the Docker build context.

docker_build and only=

The docker_build() call’s only= parameter excludes everything but the file paths specified in only.

For example,

docker_build('image-name', '.', only=['./src', './static-files'])

is equivalent to having a .dockerignore file that looks like:


The only= parameter accepts paths, not glob patterns.


The .tiltignore file tells Tilt about file changes that should not trigger rebuilds.

Tilt looks for a file named .tiltignore in the same directory as your Tiltfile. The .tiltignore patterns have the same syntax as .dockerignore. Learn more about .dockerignore in the Dockerfile reference.

Files that match these patterns will not trigger rebuilds.

.tiltignore does not affect whether a file is included in any Docker build contexts.

Try it Yourself

If you’d like to try out the APIs in this guide, see this example repo. You can:

  • git clone https://github.com/windmilleng/ignore-examples
  • tilt up to run all the servers
  • Try editing the files and see which servers reload.

Future Work

If Tilt rebuilds an image, you should always be able to look at the logs and see which file change triggered that rebuild.

But there are still cases that are hard to debug:

1) If Tilt ignored a file change, which rule blocked the file? Was it a .dockerignore or a .tiltignore?

2) If a Docker image build wasn’t cached correctly, which file change broke the cache? Are there files in my Docker image that shouldn’t be there?

We are open to thoughts and feature requests on how to help people answer these questions!