Tilt MCP

What rrmistry/tilt-mcp MCP server does

The rrmistry/tilt-mcp MCP server connects an MCP client to a Tilt development environment. It exposes the resources managed by Tilt, their current status, detailed descriptions, and recent logs. An assistant can use this information to check whether a service compiled, identify errors in its output, or inspect why a workload is not healthy.

The server also provides actions that change Tilt state. Clients can request a resource rebuild, enable or disable one or more resources, and wait for a resource to become Ready or UpToDate. Reusable prompts cover common workflows such as debugging a failing resource, analyzing logs, checking all resources, investigating startup failures, and selectively managing services.

How it works

The server follows MCP’s separation between resources, tools, and prompts. Resource URIs expose read-only data, including all enabled resources, a named resource’s logs, and a named resource’s description. Clients that do not support MCP resource discovery can use the equivalent read-only tools: list_resources, get_resource_logs, and describe_resource.

Action tools accept resource names and, where relevant, a Tilt port. The default port is 10350; requests can target another Tilt instance by passing a different tilt_port. Log requests support a line limit and an optional case-insensitive regular-expression filter. The wait operation accepts Ready or UpToDate as its condition and defaults to a 30-second timeout.

The rrmistry/tilt-mcp MCP server is asynchronous and built with Python type hints and FastMCP. Errors are reported for missing resources, Tilt connection problems, and JSON parsing failures. Operations are logged to ~/.tilt-mcp/tilt_mcp.log.

Setup and configuration

The documented Python installation is:

pip install tilt-mcp

Python 3.10 or newer is required. Tilt must already be installed and configured, and the client must support MCP. Claude Desktop and mcp-cli are listed as example clients. The README also documents a Docker-based option, intended especially for macOS and Windows, but the supplied material does not include the image name or a complete Docker command.

Docker operation uses the host’s ~/.tilt-dev directory and can discover Tilt’s API port from the Tilt configuration. The mounted directory needs write access because the Tilt CLI may create lock files. Multiple Tilt instances can be addressed by passing different port values to requests.

Tools and capabilities

Available read-only capabilities include:

• List enabled resources and their statuses.
• Retrieve a resource’s recent logs, with configurable tail length and regex filtering.
• Describe a resource in detail.

State-changing and monitoring tools include:

• Trigger a resource rebuild or update.
• Enable several resources, optionally enabling only the supplied set.
• Disable one or more resources.
• Wait for a resource to reach Ready or UpToDate.

The rrmistry/tilt-mcp MCP server also supplies guided prompts for resource debugging, log analysis, startup troubleshooting, whole-environment health checks, and resource-usage optimization.

Limitations and notes

This server depends on a reachable, configured Tilt environment; it is not a replacement for installing or configuring Tilt. Resource-management tools have side effects, so clients should distinguish them from the read-only resources and inspection tools. The supplied documentation specifies default values and parameters but does not describe authentication, remote hosting, or a hosted Tilt service. The log filter is a regular expression, so invalid patterns may affect log retrieval even though the server documents error handling for several other failure types.