Tidewave

Tidewave speeds up development with an AI assistant that understands your web application, how it runs, and what it delivers. Our current release connects your editor's assistant to your web framework runtime via MCP.

See our website for more information.

Installation

Manually

You can install Tidewave by adding the tidewave package to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:tidewave, "~> 0.2", only: :dev}
  ]
end

Then, for Phoenix applications, go to your lib/my_app_web/endpoint.ex and right above the if code_reloading? do block, add:

+  if Code.ensure_loaded?(Tidewave) do
+    plug Tidewave
+  end

   if code_reloading? do

Tidewave will now run on the same port as your regular Phoenix application. In particular, the MCP is located by default at http://localhost:4000/tidewave/mcp. You must configure your editor and AI assistants accordingly.

Using Igniter

Alternatively, you can use igniter to automatically install it into an existing Phoenix application:

# install igniter_new if you haven't already
mix archive.install hex igniter_new

# install tidewave
mix igniter.install tidewave

Usage in non-Phoenix applications

Tidewave is a regular Plug, so you can use it in any Elixir project, as long as you run a web server. For example, you can use bandit (and tidewave) in dev mode in your mix.exs:

{:tidewave, "~> 0.2", only: :dev},
{:bandit, "~> 1.0", only: :dev},

And then adding an alias in your mix.exs:

aliases: [
  tidewave:
    "run --no-halt -e 'Agent.start(fn -> Bandit.start_link(plug: Tidewave, port: 4000) end)'"
]

Now run mix tidewave and Tidewave will be available at localhost:4000/tidewave.

Troubleshooting

Tidewave expects your web application to be running on localhost. If you are not running on localhost, you may need to set some additional configuration. In particular, you must pass allow_remote_access: true to plug Tidewave and optionally configure the origin you are accessing from, for example:

  plug Tidewave,
   allow_remote_access: true,
   allowed_origins: ["http://company.local"]

If you want to use Docker for development, you either need to enable the configuration above or automatically redirect the relevant ports, as done by devcontainers. See our containars guide for more information.

If you have enabled Content-Security-Policy, Tidewave Web also requires "unsafe-eval" to be enabled under script-src in order for contextual browser testing to work correctly.

Configuration

You may configure the Tidewave plug using the following syntax:

  plug Tidewave, options

The following options are available:

:allowed_origins - if using the MCP from a browser, this can be a list of values matched against the Origin header to prevent cross origin and DNS rebinding attacks. When using Phoenix, this defaults to the Endpoint's URL.
:allow_remote_access - Tidewave only allows requests from localhost by default, even if your server listens on other interfaces as well. If you trust your network and need to access Tidewave from a different machine, this configuration can be set to true.
:autoformat - When writing Elixir source files, Tidewave will automatically format them with mix format by default. Setting this option to false disables autoformatting.
:inspect_opts - Custom options passed to Kernel.inspect/2 when formatting some tool results. Defaults to: [charlists: :as_lists, limit: 50, pretty: true]

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.