tilt-dev / tilt-dev/tilt

Detect/mitigate stuck Docker builds

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#4,896 2 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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enhancement
Dominant language
Go
Stars
10.1k
Forks
413
Avg merge
1d 10h
Merged PRs (30d)
6

Description

We received a report of a Docker build getting stuck, reporting no status, and never completing. It first happened after a Live Update crash fallback, but the same behavior happened after a fresh tilt up. The user was able to get things to proceed after running a docker system prune.

Given these conditions, it seems less likely to be a pure Tilt bug, but the experience is frustrating, particularly because there's no practical way to address it within Tilt.

I think there might be several possible improvements here:

  • Have a (configurable?) timeout for max duration w/o any activity from BuildKit
  • Possibility to trigger a from-scratch build, e.g. docker build --no-cache ... to eliminate bad intermediary containers
  • Detect critically low / out of disk space [probably tricky w/ Docker for Mac/Windows and their hidden VMs] and suggest running prune (or triggering an immediate/more aggressive tilt docker prune)

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by reproducing the stuck build with tilt up, compare behavior before and after docker system prune, and investigate the BuildKit activity and disk-space conditions described here. Done would require selecting and validating a concrete mitigation, such as timeout handling, a from-scratch build option, or actionable disk-space guidance.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
docker
Domain
build-system, devops, infrastructure
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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