Hello nerds! I’m hosting a lot of things on my home lab using docker compose. I have a private repo in GitHub for the config files. This is working fine for me, but every time I want to make a change I have to push the changes, then ssh to the lab, pull the changes, and run docker compose up. This is of course working fine, but I want to automate it. Does anyone have a similar setup and know of a good tool? I know I could use watchtower to update existing images, but this is more for if I change a setting or add a new service.

I’ve considered roughly four approaches.

  1. A new container that mounts the whole running directory and the docker socket. It will register a webhook in GitHub to receive notifications when I push to the repo, run git pull and docker up. My worries here are the usual dind gotchas.

  2. Same as 1, but don’t mount anything, instead ssh from container to host and run the steps there. This solves any dind issues, but I don’t love giving the container an ssh key to the host.

  3. Have a service running on the host outside of docker. This is probably the correct approach, but very annoying since my host is a Synology nas and it doesn’t have systemd or anything like that afaik.

  4. Have a GitHub action ssh to the machine and do the steps. Honestly the easiest way but I would prefer to not open ssh to the internet.

Any feedback or tips are much appreciated. I don’t feel like any of my options are very good and I feel like I am probably missing something obvious.