Hello! I was wondering if running periodically a script to automatically pull new images for all my containers is a good or a bad idea. I’d run it everyday at 5.00AM to avoid interruptions. Any tips?
EDIT: Thanks to everyone for the help! I’ll install Watchtower to manage the updates
Why not just let Watchtower do it for you?
Because I was today years old when I found out this beautiful piece of software exist :D
thank you very much!
I use Watchtower and haven’t had any major issues in the two(?) years I’ve been using it. Make sure you use persistent volumes for your containers and make sure you back up those volumes. If anything breaks, you can roll back to before the update.
If you don’t use persistent volumes, you’ll lose data when Watchtower takes down the image and replaces it with the newer one (which doesn’t copy over ephemeral volumes).
I also recommend for database containers to use an image tag that won’t update with breaking changes. Don’t use
postgres:latest, usepostgres:15.2or something like that (whatever the image you’re using the database for recommends).Pretty solid advice.
One could argue though that a backup script could pull the particular container image right after doing the backup to have maximum coverage.
If someone is already that adept at scripting to rely on a script to do automatic backups, they can very well pull the new images and clean old ones.
I‘m one of those who have a backup script and still use watchtower.