This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/TheNick0fTime on 2025-04-08 04:09:47+00:00.

The majority of solutions I’ve seen for managing updates for Docker containers are either fully automated (using Watchtower with latest tags for automatic version updates) or fully manual (using something like WUD or diun to send notifications, to then manually update). The former leaves too many things to go wrong (breaking changes, bad updates, etc) and the latter is a bit too inconvenient for me to reliably stay on top of.

After some research, trial, and error, I successfully built a pipeline for managing my updates that I am satisfied with. The setup is quite complicated at first, but the end result achieves the following:

• Docker compose files are safely stored and versioned in Gitea.
• Updates are automatically searched for every night using Renovate.
• Email notifications are sent for any found updates.
• Applying updates is as easy as clicking a button.
• Docker containers are automatically redeployed once an update has been applied via Komodo.

Figuring this all out was not the easiest thing I have done, so I decided to write a guide about how to do it all, start to finish. Enjoy!