Updates… It could be a tedious task, but it has to be done.
If you run containers in your homelab, you can easily get to the point where manually update all of your container images becomes a boring moment of your day. It would be nice if we can delegate this task to someone else and, maybe, receive a notification once all it’s done. Well, fortunately we can do this with Watchtower!
IMPORTANT! Despite we can automate this boring task, my advice is to not do it and always update manually.
Check the release notes first! Update always with the newest release might not be worth.
To give it a go, we firstly need to create a Telegram Bot for Watchtower. We can ask the BotFather to guide us in the process. When the bot creation is done, BotFather will give us our BOT_TOKEN. Keep it safe, we will need it later!
Once we have our token, we need to get our CHAT_ID with GetIDsBot.
It’s so exciting to create our personal bot, isn’t it?
So, now it’s time to get our hands dirty into the terminal. I chose the docker-compose way. So…
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mkdir watchtower
cd watchtower
touch docker-compose.yml
nano docker-compose.yml
docker-compose.yml
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---
version: '3.3'
services:
watchtower:
image: containrrr/watchtower
container_name: watchtower
restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
- '/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock'
environment:
- TZ=Europe/London
- WATCHTOWER_LIFECYCLE_HOOKS=True
- WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATIONS=shoutrrr
- WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATION_URL=telegram://BOT_TOKEN@telegram/?channels=CHAT_ID
- WATCHTOWER_DEBUG=true
- WATCHTOWER_CLEANUP=true
- WATCHTOWER_SCHEDULE=0 0 20 * * 0
Watchtower uses shoutrrr to send notifications via different applications.
Just replace BOT_TOKEN and CHAT_ID with your own ones, and it’s done!
With this setup, Watchtower will do its magic every sunday at 20:00 (8:00pm), sends us notifications through our Telegram Bot and delete the old images. Once we set all up, we can write and save the file.
Now we can create our Watchtower container with:
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sudo docker-compose up -d
If everything goes well, we should receive a Telegram notification from our Watchtower Bot telling us when the first check will be performed.
You can always refer to the Watchtower Documentation if you want to play around.