Back in the day it was nice, apt get update && apt get upgrade and you were done.
But today every tool/service has it’s own way to being installed and updated:
- docker:latest
- docker:v1.2.3
- custom script
- git checkout v1.2.3
- same but with custom migration commands afterwards
- custom commands change from release to release
- expect to do update as a specific user
- update nginx config
- update own default config and service has dependencies on the config changes
- expect new versions of tools
- etc.
I selfhost around 20 services like PieFed, Mastodon, PeerTube, Paperless-ngx, Immich, open-webui, Grafana, etc. And all of them have some dependencies which need to be updated too.
And nowadays you can’t really keep running on an older version especially when it’s internet facing.
So anyway, what are your strategies how to keep sanity while keeping all your self hosted services up to date?
I am developing a script which will do that specifically for my services.
Right now at the first stage it only checks GitHub, Codeberg, etc. To check if there is a new version compared to what each service is running right now.
https://git.jeena.net/jeena/service-update-alerts
I am extending it now with a auto update part, but it’s difficult because sometimes I can’t just call a static script because some other migration things need to run. So I have a classifier which takes the release notes and let’s a local LLM to judge if it’s OK to run the automation or if I need to do it manually. But for that I am collecting old release notes as examples from each service. This takes forever to do so I only have it done for PieFed, PeerTube, Immich and open-webui, and I didn’t push those changes to the public repo yet.