Setting a Personal Registry with a shared Tiltfile
You should be able to start an app on Kubernetes from just the source code. One stumbling block is when YAML and scripts hard-code the image repository (the gcr.io/windmill in gcr.io/windmill/user-service). Tilt’s default_registry function lets you change the image repository so you don’t have to ask permission to get started. This guide walks you through two cases:
- for users, how to experiment with an existing Tilt project by adding one line to the Tiltfile
- for maintainers, how to configure your project so users don’t need to modify the Tiltfile at all
Experiment with an existing Tilt project
You’ve cloned a repo, run tilt up, and see push errors saying you lack permission. Pick a registry that you can push to, like gcr.io/my-personal-project. Add the following line to the Tiltfile:
default_registry('gcr.io/my-personal-project')
Tilt will rewrite an image like user-service to gcr.io/my-personal-project/user-service. You can learn more details in the api reference.
Configure a Project to support Personal Registries
The above solution isn’t a good long-term solution: users have to make sure to not commit their personal registry. It’s especially frustrating if the user is trying to change other lines in the Tiltfile. A better solution is to read the option from a personal settings file that is .gitignore‘d.
We’re going to modify the Tiltfile to look for a file called tilt_option.json next to the Tiltfile. You can add more settings here (do different team members want different services to behave differently? Put it in tilt_option.json). For now, we’ll expect the file to either be nonexistent, or JSON like
{
"default_registry": "gcr.io/my-personal-project"
}
Add this code to the Tiltfile:
settings = read_json('tilt_option.json', default={})
default_registry(settings.get('default_registry', 'gcr.io/shared-project-registry'))
Add a line to your .gitignore:
# personal tilt settings
tilt_option.json
Team members don’t need to set anything, but new users can change it without modifying the Tiltfile.
Different URLs from Inside Your Cluster
Some clusters/registries require that your Kubernetes YAML reference images by a different name: e.g. you might push your image to localhost:5000/my-image but reference it from within your YAML as registry:5000/my-image. Tilt supports this use case; use the host_from_cluster parameter of default_registry to configure the registry host as referenced from your K8s YAML. E.g. for the example above, you would call:
default_registry(
'localhost:5000',
host_from_cluster='registry:5000'
)
Config in Files, not Flags
Other tools might make this a command-line flag, or an environment variable. Tilt encourages you to put it in a file. Why the difference? Tilt wants to be a responsive tool. You can’t change a command-line flag without restarting the tool, and we want you to be able to use Tilt without restarting.
We also want to let you write Tiltfile’s that support your project. If you have lots of services, you may not want to run all of them all of the time. With a tilt_option.json that you can change, you can switch services on or off.
This functionality is in the early stages, and we’d like to make it better supported. If you have thoughts/ideas/needs, please talk to us.