Selfhosted

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:[email protected]/?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 use watchtower and hope nothing will break. I never read breaking changes.

When an issue happens, I just search the internet or change the tag to a known working version until the issue is resolved.

I can afford to have my server down for a few days. It’s not critical to me.

It depends on the project. If the project doesn't make an effort to highlight them I would consider using a different one.

But any decent OSS will make a good change log for their updates that you can read.

You weren't asking me, but I've used K8s professionally and my take is that K8s is only suited for business environments, ones with a good number of devs and users and complex deployment/runtime needs. You're not finding that "aha!" with K8s for self-hosting at home because, simply put, you are not the target market. It's way overkill for your needs. The one exception is if you're trying to learn it at home so you can use it in a corporate environment. In that case, go wild. But just don't expect it to make sense for most modest home lab or self-hosting needs.

For sure, just stacking turtles all the way down... 🐢 It's definitely overkill for a home lab, but I'm an infra engineer, and it's what I use daily, so setting it up was worth it because I'm already really familiar with the stack. That said, I do absolutely love having declarative setup at home because I'll sometimes go months without touching things. Before I spent the time to make it declarative, I'd frequently forget how I set certain things up and waste time redoing, or figuring out where I left off. Now I just check commit history and I'm always moving forward.

There’s plenty of tutorials out there for it. A quick DuckDuckGo search turned up this as one of the first results, but the theory is the same if you wanted to bundle ‘arr containers instead of nginx/whatever. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/workflow-multiple-containers-docker-compose

Essentially you create docker compose file for services, within which you have as many containers as you want set up like you would any other compose file. You ‘docker compose pull’ and ‘docker compose up -d’ to update/install just like you would for individual docker container, but it does them all together. It sounds like others in the thread have more automated someone with services dedicated to watching for updates and running those automatically but I just look for a flag in the app saying there’s an update available and pull/ up -d whenever it’s convenient/I realize there’s an update.

Last time it happened was with one of the newer Nextcloud updates. It was a bit of trial and error, but I eventually went back to a version that worked and I could fix the underlying issue. There should be a list of version tags either on dockerhub or GitHub that list all versions that have been pushed to live and are available to pull