I used to simply use the ‘latest’ version tag, but that occasionally caused problems with breaking changes in major updates.
I’m currently using podman-compose and I manually update the release tags periodically, but the number of containers keeps increasing, so I’m not very happy with this solution. I do have a simple script which queries the Docker Hub API for tags, which makes it slightly easier to find out whether there are updates.
I imagine a solution with a nice UI for seeing if updates are available and possibly applying them to the relevant compose files. Does anything like this exist or is there a better solution?
WatchTower can auto uodate your container or notify you when an update is available, I use it with a Matrix account for notifications
Yes, https://containrrr.dev/watchtower/ is a great tool. Used it myself for a whole now.
Sorry if it’s obvious, but I don’t see a way to use Matrix for notifications on their documentation and my searching is coming up blank. Do you by chance have a tutorial for this?
Here is how I did it:
docker run -d \
--name watchtower \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
-e WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATION_URL=matrix://username:password@domain.org/?rooms=!ROOMID:domain.org \
-e WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATION_TEMPLATE="{{range .}}[WatchTower] ({{.Level}}): {{.Message}}{{println}}{{end}}" \
containrrr/watchtower
Edit: I created a pull request to the WatchTower documentation, here: https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower/pull/1690
I pin most of my images and have https://newreleases.io/ tell me if something gets an update
Ideally containers are provided with a major release version tag, so not just :latest but :0.18 for all 0.18.x releases that should in theory not break compatibility.
Then you can set your Podman systemd configuration file (I use Quadlet .container files) to automatically check for new versions and update them.
The beer way I’ve found is to wait till something breaks. Message around on forums asking why I’m getting errors till someone recommends update and restart.
Blindly Remove the docker. Recreate.
And hope none of the configs break. ✌️💛
Since my “homelab” is just that, a homelab, I’m comfortable with using :latest-tag on all my containers and just running docker-compose pull and docker-compose up -d once per week.
This is mostly my strategy too. Most of the time I don’t have any issues, but occasionally I’ll jump straight to a version with breaking changes. If I have time to fix I go find the patch notes and update my config, otherwise I just tag the older version and come back later.
I’ve recently been moving my containers from docker compose into pure ansible though since I can write roles/playbooks to push config files and cycle containers which previously required multiple actions on docker compose. It’s also helped me to turn what used to be notes into actual code instead.
