TL;DR: is there an app that can alert me when a new version of some other app is available?
I have about 12 - 15 services (freshrss, heimdall, photoprism, Wordpress, etc) running using docker compose spread across 4 hosts. Through my self-hosting journey I’ve been burned a few times using “latest” images so I now pin app image versions within compose.
The problem then becomes that every couple of weeks, I have to go out to different GitHub’s, docker hub, etc. to see if a new update for that service is available. It gets a bit tedious with 12-15 services every couple of weeks so I need a centralized and more efficient way of “keeping up”.
Is there some type of app that can track whether an app/service has a new version available? Ideally it can send me some type of notification, self-hostable, and ideally not Portainer?
GitHub has the option of emailing you on releases etc. by email.
You can also hook it to RSS https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7353538/setting-up-a-github-commit-rss-feed
Yeah, depending on the branch I’ve found that method not to be too reliable. openrss offers branches for RSS feeds for commits on every branch though: e.g. https://openrss.org/github.com/octokit/octokit.rb/commits/main
The best thing would be to make yourself a web crawler which get executed by cron.
I’m not sure there is something which check some specific strings on some specific github repos for checking updates, but I could be wrong.
I don’t know how well this is supported by sundry source repos but off the cuff I’d say you’re looking for an RSS feed of their individual releases?
Edit: Github seems to have release feeds for projects: https://piraces.dev/short-bits/github-releases-feed-atom/
Maybe take a look at Diun or Watchtower
I use Diun and ntfy to get push notifications about new docker image versions on my smartphone. Other options include notifications for Discord, mail, MQTT, Slack, Webhook and more.
Taking a brief look at that blog post, the author doesn’t know that wt can be set to only notify… Or that wt can be set to act at specific date or time… It’s like they never looked at the wt env variables at all, just yolo defaults and then complain that it doesn’t do what they want out of the box (‘because my settings are the best and they should clearly be the default for everyone!’). For someone who spent much time exploring other options and complaining, they didn’t take ~10 minutes to learn that the initial issue was indeed themselves.
(I use wt and set up many options to avoid these issues, successfully)
While of course Watchtower can be configured to not update and only notify there is also a nice, lightweight alternative out there that is built only for image update notifications: Diun.
I think he looked at it.
I just have Watchtower stopped and configured in “one-shot” mode sitting on all my Docker hosts. And when I’m in the mood of updating and fighting with possible issues, I just run it. Works much better for me than some update notification popping up in the worst possible moment, me dismissing it and then forgetting about it. 🤣
