Gemini CLI - Automatically retrieve DTD URI for Hot Reload

[anderdobo]

Automatically retrieve active DTD URI to enable Hot Reload, rather than prompt the user to manually retrieve and provide it.

[jakemac53]

Note that with the VsCode integration now available for Gemini CLI via the companion extension, we should be able to add access to the tools registered by VsCode extensions, which would include the one to get the DTD Uri.

It would require that you have enabled the IDE integration with Gemini CLI but should help in that case.

[mit-mit]

Could we do something to get it working in the CLI too? What's the techical challenge to do that?

[jakemac53]

The challenge is that these processes are totally disconnected from one another so you have to somehow figure out a way to connect them up.

Closing this as a duplicate of #168 which has more discussion related to this, as well as some potential solutions which have been discussed.

[mit-mit]

Sorry, I may be missing something, but if I'm running Gemini CLI (in my CLI) and that then in turn runs the flutter CLI (in the CLI), then are all the processes not in the CLI and not in the IDE (even if I happen to have that running to just read my code)?

[jakemac53]

Is that really possible to have Gemini CLI actually run your flutter app given it never exits? I would assume it would just hang waiting for the command to complete.

[davidmigloz]

As far as I know, Claude Code does support running background tasks, but not the Gemini CLI.

[jakemac53]

In that case, all you probably need to do is make sure you run with --print-dtd and that will print the dtd URI for that app, the LLM should be able to pick it up.

[mit-mit]

Yeah, it's possible, here's an example from using Jaspr:

[mit-mit]

I tried adding this to ~/.gemini/GEMINI.md:

## Gemini Added Memories
- When running a Flutter app use device id "iphone"
- When running "flutter run" add the flag "--print-dtd" to get the url to the DTD needed to hot reload,
  and run it in the background as the command will not end on its own.

That nearly fixes it:

Looks like it's confused about how to parse the output?

[jakemac53]

Hmm it shows the correct URI in the tool arguments but the message indicates a different URI. In general the MCP server does today expect to be connected to a single persistent DTD instance so its possible the real issue is that it was previously connected in this same session to a different DTD service and then when you try to reconnect you get a weird error back? Not entirely sure.

In general though the happy path right now its to start the app from your IDE, and connect to the DTD instance from your IDE.

[mit-mit]

I don't think we can assume that all developers start with the IDE. Given Gemini CLI is so CLI focused, some will start there. Does #168 assume IDE flows only? If so, we should reactivate this issue.