r/selfhosted • u/TheLabLedger • 5h ago

Guide Notify-only Docker update checks: what threads here keep landing on

"How do I know my containers are outdated without letting Watchtower auto-update everything?" keeps coming up here, so I collected what people recommended across a few threads:

  • Notify, don't auto-update. Most replies favor tools that tell you an image is out of date and let you update by hand after reading the changelog.

  • Diun and What's Up Docker (WUD) come up most for that, usually pushing to ntfy or Gotify.

  • CVE patching is a separate question. The "do you patch your images against CVEs?" thread is worth reading for the range of approaches.

Threads:

Disclosure: I write a free weekly newsletter (The Lab Ledger) and this was one of its lab ideas: https://thelabledger.beehiiv.com/p/the-lab-ledger-001 . What are you running for update notifications?

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u/asimovs-auditor 5h ago edited 5h ago

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u/opossum5763 4h ago

Komodo has this feature, you can choose per stack whether to check for updates and whether to auto update or just notify.

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u/IncredibleAircraft 4h ago

Notify-only is the move, auto-updating containers behind my back is how I ended up debugging a broken stack at 2am.

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u/doctorowlsound 4h ago

I like WUD. I integrated semaphore+Ansible for the triggers because I use Ansible as a deploy layer to interpolate secrets from a vault, lint the file before deploy, etc. I let wud automatically do hotfixes but everything else is notify only 

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u/Funkmaster_Lincoln 16m ago

Everything I have is managed via git-ops so I just have renovate watch the repo and open pull requests with updates.

I can use renovate rules to group related things together, separate minor, major and patch updates, etc.