Comment on How do you keep up?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks agoAutomatically upgrading docker images sounds like a recipe for disaster because:
- could pull down change that requires manual intervention, so things “randomly” break
- docker holds on to everything, so you’d need to prune old images or you’ll eventually run out of disk space; if a container is stopped, your prune would make it unbootable (good luck if the newer images are incompatible with when it last ran)
That’s why I refuse to automate updates. I sometimes go weeks or months between using a given service, so I’d rather use vulnerable containers than have to go fix it when I need it.
I run OS updates every month or two, and honestly I’d be okay automating those. I run docker pulls every few months, and there’s no way I’d automate that.
Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
I’ve encountered that before with Watchtower updating parts of a serrvice and breaking everything the whole stack. But automating a stack update, as opposed to a service update, should mitigate all of that.
Most of my stacks are stable so aside from breaking changes I should be fine. If I hit a breaking change, I keep backups, I’ll rebuild and update manually. I think that’ll be a net time save over all.
I keep two docker lxcs, one for arrs and one for everything else. I might make a third lxc for things that currently require manual updates. Immich is my only one currently.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Glad it works for you.
Automatic updates of software with potential breaking changes scares me. I’m not familiar with watchtower, since I don’t use it or anything like it, but I have several services that I don’t use very often, but would suck if they silently stopped working properly.
When I think of a service, I think of something like Nextcloud, Immich, etc, even if they consist of multiple containers. For example, I have a separate containers for libre office online and Nextcloud, but I upgrade them together. I don’t want automated upgrades of either because I never know if future builds will be compatible. So I go update things when I remember, but I make sure everything works after.
That said, it seems watchtower can be used to merely notify, so maybe I’ll use it for that. I certainly want to be around for any automatic updates though.
Fedegenerate@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
It’s Watchtower that I had problems with because of what you described. Watchtower will drop your microservice, say a database to update it and then not reset the things that are dependent on it. It can be great just not in the ham fisted way I used it.
Uptime Kuma can alert you when a service goes down. I am constantly in my Homarr homepage that tells me if it can’t ping a service, then I go investigating.
I get that it’s scary, and after my Watchtower trauma I was hesitant to go automatic too. But, I’m managing 5 machines now, and scaling by getting more so I have to think about scale.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I don’t use Watchtower myself for the same reasons described, but I was under the understanding if you had a container as a dependency on another container that if you took the dependency down it also took the container down. Is this not actually true?