TL;DR: is there an app that can alert me when a new version of some other app is available?
I have about 12 - 15 services (freshrss, heimdall, photoprism, Wordpress, etc) running using docker compose spread across 4 hosts. Through my self-hosting journey I’ve been burned a few times using “latest” images so I now pin app image versions within compose.
The problem then becomes that every couple of weeks, I have to go out to different GitHub’s, docker hub, etc. to see if a new update for that service is available. It gets a bit tedious with 12-15 services every couple of weeks so I need a centralized and more efficient way of “keeping up”.
Is there some type of app that can track whether an app/service has a new version available? Ideally it can send me some type of notification, self-hostable, and ideally not Portainer?
I use Diun and ntfy to get push notifications about new docker image versions on my smartphone. Other options include notifications for Discord, mail, MQTT, Slack, Webhook and more.
Taking a brief look at that blog post, the author doesn't know that wt can be set to only notify... Or that wt can be set to act at specific date or time... It's like they never looked at the wt env variables at all, just yolo defaults and then complain that it doesn't do what they want out of the box ('because my settings are the best and they should clearly be the default for everyone!'). For someone who spent much time exploring other options and complaining, they didn't take ~10 minutes to learn that the initial issue was indeed themselves.
(I use wt and set up many options to avoid these issues, successfully)
That will just pull the latest image though right? I.e., if you explicitly have a container on a tag for v1.2.3, it wouldn't upgrade you when v1.2.4 is released right?
I selfhost an instance of ntfy and changedetecttion.
Ntfy is for simple push notifications from absolutely anything, even just curl.
Changedetection is for detecting changes on websites, prices, is something in stock, ... It supports ntfy for push notifications so I just add the releases page from github to changedetection and then I get a push notification on my phone when anything gets an update.
Not more but I would say it offers some additional options and integrations, because it's api based.
For example, on my server I connected it with ntfy.sh which executes the command to pull the update, for the apps' docker container. (It's working 90% of the time)
I just have Watchtower stopped and configured in "one-shot" mode sitting on all my Docker hosts. And when I'm in the mood of updating and fighting with possible issues, I just run it. Works much better for me than some update notification popping up in the worst possible moment, me dismissing it and then forgetting about it. 🤣
If you have your compose files in git, you might be able to use renovate to send you pull requests with image updates. I’ve done something similar with kubernetes but I think it supports docker compose too. You might need some kind of automation on your hosts to keep things in sync.
The best thing would be to make yourself a web crawler which get executed by cron.
I'm not sure there is something which check some specific strings on some specific github repos for checking updates, but I could be wrong.