TL;DR: I want to keep my containers up to date, currently Portainer based compose files updated by renovate. How do you do it?

Status Quo

I’m hosting a few containers on my Unraid Homeserver for personal use, but I don’t use the Unraid Webinterface to control them. I’m running Portainer CE in a Container on the host. Within Portainer I use the “Stacks” feature to define my containers. The Stack-files (basically docker-compose files) reside in a private Git(-hub) repository. I configured renovate to create pull requests to the Git repository in case there are new updates for the container images (aka new tagged images).

Issues

Currently I’m not really satisfied with that workflow. These are the issues I have:

  • It’s not really automatic. I still have to manually approve the Pull Requests on GitHub, even though I don’t test them before applying
  • I once updated a specific container but the database structure of the application changed. I had to manually restore the application data from a backup
  • Some containers I use don’t have proper versioning (e.g. only a “latest” image)
  • For some containers renovate doesn’t open Pull Requests for updates. I think it’s because the images are not in Docker Hub, but on GitHub or other registries.
  • Adding new stacks to Portainer is cumbersome, I have to specify the Git repository, the path of the docker-compose file and credentials everytime.

Wishlist

What I would like to have:

  • Automatic Updates to my containers (bug fixes, new features, security fixes)
    • Updates should apply automatically except if I pin the image tag/version
  • Before updating a container the container should get shutdown and a copy of the application data should be created
  • If the container exits unexpectedly after an update, an automatic rollback should get applied. Notification to me and no further updates for this container until I continue it.
  • Container definitions should be defined in a version controlled code/text, e.g. docker-compose files in a Git repo
  • Solution should be self hosted

Questions

I’m aware of watchtower, but as far as I see it only updates the live-configuration of the system. So no version control or roll-backs. What do you folks think? Are my requirements stupid overkill for a homeserver? How do you keep your container based applications up to date?

  • @eluvatar@programming.devEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    We use Rancher fleet. It monitors a repo for k8s YAML files and applies them to the cluster automatically. But that doesn’t sound like it would work for you.

    As for PRs, I’m sure you can setup a GitHub workflow to automatically merge PRs (I’d make sure to filter them by the author though).

    For the images without proper versions you can always use the Image ID as a pinned reference to a specific image. Though whether that same image is still in docker hub is a different story.

    A lot of your wishlist could be done quite easily with kubernetes. The automatic update isn’t built in but tools exist to help you with that (even rancher fleet).