#docker – Updating docker containers automatically with Watchtower. Bonus: let’s learn Go !

Hi !

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how I like Portainer as a visual interface to manage docker (see references). In one of the comments, Marco suggested also an option to automatically update all my containers.

As I explained in my post, the basic steps for this are

• docker stop
• docker rm
• docker pull
• docker run

Super easy, but tedious if you need to do this several times. Let’s meet Watchover.

Watchtover has the ability to “watch” running Docker containers on either the same local or remote host, check if there is a newer image in the remote registry, and then update the container with the new image using the same configuration options it was instantiated with.

I give this a try, and I found that it was very easy, just a command

docker run -d \
    --name watchtower \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    containrrr/watchtower

And, there is a personal bonus here. I’ve been looking for an excuse to start to play around with Go, and this is the one. I think, I’ll use the excuse of update my containers as my next phase on Go learning.

References

• How to update Portainer (big fan here!)
• GitHub, Watchtower