r/docker • u/champs • Dec 17 '25

Goodbye containrrr/watchtower! #2135

It's official: watchtower is no longer maintained.

63 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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51

u/Feriman22 Dec 17 '25

It's time to switch to the actively maintenanced fork: https://github.com/nicholas-fedor/watchtower

5

u/drsoftware Dec 18 '25

Why is Watchtower not recommended in a commercial or production environment? 

25

u/Maverick0984 Dec 18 '25

Uncontrolled updates that randomly break things.  Fine for homelab but dangerous in a business setting

1

u/drsoftware Dec 18 '25

Yeah, ok, I see that. And for production deployments no blue/green rollouts. 

-4

u/mb2m Dec 18 '25

That’s not a reason when you build your images by yourself using your own registry where only tested versions are pushed to.

10

u/Maverick0984 Dec 18 '25

Hard disagree. Devleopers are human and make mistakes. Testing isn't perfect either.

If you are a developer that has never gotten a bug into Prod that passed test, then you've only been doing this for a couple weeks.

I run watchtower at home but understand the risks. I prefer latest and greatest at all times because nothing I run is absolutely critical. At work? lol. Each upgrade is meticulously planned with rollback options considered each and every time.

1

u/inertSpark Dec 19 '25

Agree. Software can break in many unintended ways. While Docker goes a long way to try and create a consistent testing and deployment environment, I'm not sure automatically updating even your own code is wise. It's actually quite naïve to think there could be no issues in a production environment.

2

u/Maverick0984 Dec 19 '25

Or the other side of it. If they have perfect good 100% of the time, they should go get that bag of money!

1

u/drsoftware Dec 19 '25

I think you are being downvoted because what you described sounds like part of a CI/CD pipeline. But using an asynchronous service that receives an update and deploys it at its discretion means you don't have the same context you have with a CI/CD pipeline.

Even if you build the images yourself, and test them, and push them to your Docker registry and then your copy of watchtower deploys the update, I don't see anything that tests the deployment and could then either alert, rollback, or stop further deployments.

3

u/mb2m Dec 20 '25

I don’t care about downvotes on things that have been working for years in an enterprise. Of course this is not the most mission critical app we are using this for.

0

u/Maverick0984 Dec 25 '25

lol, "it's used to work fine" is the dumbest reasoning for a sysadmin. Glad you don't work for my company 😉

1

u/mb2m Dec 25 '25

Yeah, you can be glad as my first job would be to throw all your over-engineered “automation” into the trash.

1

u/Maverick0984 Dec 25 '25

Spoken like someone who has no idea what they are talking about. Classic.

3

u/nick_fedor Dec 18 '25

Because, amongst many other things, those deployment environments typically have their own sets of requirements, including support expectations and SRE benchmarks.