Those of you self hosters who use watchtower, what's your use case?
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Auto update. Works like a charm, except PostgreSQL. For me it's good enough and even though works with containers, where they don't recommend it. I do have backups and for my private time, I don't get paid, so it should be as maintenance as possible from my side.
I do check from time to time if something is broken and I noticed a container where they removed a version tag, I was using. The "biggest" thing that was broken, was my gitea server where they changed the config for the default Theme.
Also that's why I hate PostgreSQL. It requires manual labor for updating. Had a recipe Docker and they cut support for previous major version quickly. Not good. That stuff could break, ist an option with every update. This is why backups exist. As a single user, it's not a problem. For a big system, I wouldn't do auto updates, so I can check if everything works.
I only let me notify about updates. I don't want autoupdates, because some projects may have breaking changes (looking at you Immich 😁)
I get a message from watchtower over Gotify and then I can read the changelog
I've been thinking about this. Can you do that with watchtower? Don't need diem or anything?
It is very easy. Here is my compose:
services:
watchtower:
image: containrrr/watchtower
container_name: watchtower
restart: always
volumes:
- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
- /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
command: --interval 10800
logging:
driver: local
environment:
WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATION_URL: gotify://
WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATIONS_HOSTNAME: Fancy name
WATCHTOWER_MONITOR_ONLY: true
WATCHTOWER_WARN_ON_HEAD_FAILURE: never
Every 3 hours it will check for updates, send a message via Gotify and pull the new images. It will not restart the containers with the new images.
Is it possible to have it auto update say one container and notify the rest?
No, because MONITOR_ONLY is for all