Watchtower Version 2

[nicholas-fedor]

I'm interested in your thoughts regarding the next major release of Watchtower.
What things would you like to see that would warrant a breaking change from the current version?
Please feel free to share them below!

[miketardif]

Rollback updates that fail to start similar to podman update

[qistoph]

Hear, hear! I prefer not pinning my versions too much, to allow for as much security and functional updates as possible, without any maintenance. Sometimes an image is updated, subsequently a new container created and breaking my configuration. I would love Watchtower to revert back to the previous, healthy image (or container) based on the health status or in case of repeatedly 'starting'.

E.g. the other day an update of Grafana Renderer made the renderer_token mandatory. This wasn't configured yet in my compose.yaml.

What happend:

• Watchtower pulled the new image and recreated the container
• Watchtower restarts Grafana container
• Grafana container keeps restarting with an error message
• My Grafana was unavailable

What would have been nice:

• Watchtower pulled the new image and recreated the container
• Watchtower restarts Grafana container
• Grafana container keeps restarting with an error message
• Watchtower detects the malfunctioning Grafana update and reverts the image (How? I don't know yet)
• Watchtower restarts Grafana container
• Watchtower notifies me about a reverted image
• My Grafana remains available

[dR3b]

@nicholas-fedor It would be awesome if Watchtower could also check for new image versions defined in a docker-compose.yml file. I personally use Renovate to track my image versions. Whenever I merge a PR, a pipeline copies the docker-compose.yml to my server. If Watchtower could pick up the new version during its daily check and restart the container automatically, that would be a big help.

PS: Rename the project?

[Rycochet]

I probably went and did it the wrong way around as I keep forgetting Discussions exists lol - but #653 - restarting unhealthy containers - almost all the infrastructure already exists (and with better controls and abilities than the alternatives) :-)

[LiloBzH]

The ability to choose the number of days before the image update.

Currently, I update manually to avoid updating too quickly and using a buggy version.

[davin900]

The ability to choose the number of days before the image update.

Currently, I update manually to avoid updating too quickly and using a buggy version.

Yes I came here to say a "minimum age of new version" type of setting would be nice to feel more comfortable with automating updates.

[LiloBzH]

Is this option possible and implementable?

[nicholas-fedor]

Yes, but at a cost of requiring persisted storage -- something that may be necessary for a variety of reasons.

[nicholas-fedor]

Docker has released relatively recently their Compose SDK.
You can read about it here: https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-sdk/
And dive into the available options: https://github.com/docker/compose/blob/main/pkg/api/api.go

It would be interesting to explore ways to integrate this into the next major release of Watchtower.

[bluskye]

Add web-ui to easily trigger to update containers ad-hoc (maybe a check box next to each container)

[Nebulosa-Cat]

improve discord notify, now's is quit ugly, if can customized by markdown and discord embed will great.
(and plz fix the endless discord notify bug 😢 )

[jordantrizz]

Late to the conversation. I think you might get more involvement if you change the name and unlink the fork. Right now searching for watchtower it was hard to find your repository. Perhaps belltower?

[bluskye]

A re-brand is a great idea, and yes, its hard to find this project, I only ran across it through Portainer discussions

[telnetdoogie]

@nicholas-fedor I have a question about the updates to notifications, and shoutrrr.

I started seeing the deprecation warnings on my setup and read the docs related to the newer notification URLs.

Migration to the NOTIFICATION URL with the appropriate Shoutrrr URL scheme is strongly recommended.

Does this mean I need shoutrrr installed for email notifications, or just that I need to use "shoutrrr url schemes" for something like email notifications? It's not 100% clear to me if I need to be running shoutrrr in the future, or if watchtower will have shoutrrr embedded in some way.

Thanks for keeping this amazing utility alive and thriving! You're much appreciated!

[nicholas-fedor]

It just means that you should be using Shoutrrr URL's instead of the legacy configuration options.
There's no need to download/install Shoutrrr separately, unless you want to use its utility CLI separately via its binary/Docker image.

Shoutrrr is a notification library that was split off from Watchtower. Issue containrrr/shoutrrr#59 provides some insight into that. The deprecation and eventual removal of the legacy configuration options has been an ongoing development goal since early 2021, as they merely provide a backwards-compatibility abstraction layer. Using the v2 major release is a logical point to implement the breaking changes (with the legacy configuration options and supporting logic being removed entirely).

[telnetdoogie]

Great explanation! Thanks!