After too many wild rides with Watchtower auto-nuking services, thanks to breaking changes (migrations, DB updates, deployment changes, etc), I switched to What’s Up Docker and pin the version for all of my containers.

WUD lets me know when something has an update, so I periodically go through their release notes and do the update(s) manually. Usually as simple as read the notes, changes version in compose, down (or pull), then “up -d”. But this approach has saved my bacon multiple times.

I’ve seen there are other solutions - of varying degrees of promises vs delivery - but most of my stuff is long term and stable. My approach maintains all that.