I use Tugtainer to update my containers, makes pretty simple.

https://github.com/Quenary/tugtainer

You’ve done the hard work building the compose file. Push that file to a private GitHub repository, set up renovate bot and it’ll create PR’s to update those containers on whatever cadence and rules you want (such as auto updating bug fixes from certain registries).

Then you just need to set up SSH access to your VM running the containers and a simple GitHub action to push the updated compose file and run docker compose up. That’s what I do and it means updates are just a case of merging in a PR when it suits me.

Also I would suggest ditching the VM and just running the docker commands directly on the TrueNAS host - far less overheads, one less OS to maintain and makes shares resources (like a GPU) easier to manage.

You should look at restic or Kopia for backups, they are super efficient and encrypted. All my docker data is backed up hourly and thanks to the way out handles snapshots, I have backups going back literally years that don’t actually take up much space.

Since there’s no lack of solutions here I’m going to add one more. If you manage to create bash to update the containers then you can have it run with a systemd service that’s easy to set up. It’s very easy to set up and it’ll work the same as running the command no your computer.

Yah so dont use it ! Use Nix instead.

I just started playing with Dockhand and it looks like it has a built in update schedule mechanism. It’s fills a comparable role as Portainer, so maybe check that out.

Are you updating 1000’s of stacks every week? I update a couple critical things maybe once a month, and the other stuff maybe twice a year.

I don’t recommend auto updates, because updates break things and dealing with that is a lot of work.

I run about 70 containers. I really don’t find it that difficult. I do run a Watchtower fork, but I run it with --run-once --cleanup. I do that once a month after I feel confident that everyone else has done all the beta testing on the new updates for me. So hats off to all you guys who just yolo your updates. You are an invaluable resource to the selfhosting community. Thank you.

As far as Linux updates, I’m running Ubuntu Jammy so those updates don’t usually introduce breaking changes and I complete them as they become available. I use Portainer, but I am unaware of any auto—update features for Docker containers. You can feed it a new yaml and it will replace or recreate the container based on that yaml, but it doesn’t do it automatically. Portainer is just a handy way to consolidate all your container administration in one place in lieu of using the terminal.

There are other options to updating your containers like WUD, or similar. They will alert you that there is an update, but you have to manually initiate the update. Anecdotally, I’ve only encountered one breaking change and that was when Portainer updated, but was incompatible at the time with the current version of Docker, or something like that. Memory is foggy this morning. It took about an hour to find a fix, and implement it, so it wasn’t an excruciating change up.

At work I use kubernetes and quite like that (upgrading containers without downtime FTE), but I didn’t bother trying to set up the infrastructure myself. Some argue, it’s not with the efford for self hosting, I dunno.

What I do like to use is Dockge, to keep docker but also keep your sanity. It even offers a single button for “docker compose pull”, which is great of you don’t have to many compose files / stacks. Combine with a simple shell script to batch pull/build all stacks in one go, plus some backup solution, and it’s actually nice to use and does all that I need. I love CLIs, but I’ve had situations where the GUI came in very handy.

#! /bin/bash
# note: this will update and START all dockge stacks, even if you stopped them before
shopt -s nullglob
for proj in /opt/dockge /opt/stacks/*/; do
  echo "> $proj"
  docker compose -f "$proj/compose.yaml" up --pull always --build --detach
  echo ""
done

I think you would be fine just installing the apps in TrueNAS. You can have snapshots, you can have remote backup with e.g. StorJ and updating is so easy. I was also doing stuff manually but eventually found out that it’s not worth it. And realistically I won’t stop using TrueNAS anytime soon.

Watchtower exists, but iirc it is not maintained anymore.

https://github.com/mag37/dockcheck

I run this script whenever I want to update my containers. Then it’s simple to individually select the containers to up date, or all of them.

Use Nix. It is MUCH more deterministic and capable than silly Docker. It can even be used to deterministically create docker images if you really need them.

Removed by mod

With Portainer you can do GitOps and have something like Dependabot notify you of updates. I don’t believe, Portainer offers completely unattended container updates.

If you want it automated, use one of the recent Watchtower forks. It’s not recommended as automated updates may break things or introduce malware through compromised accounts, however it has worked pretty well for my personal stuff. I wouldn’t recommend it for business use.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

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