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?
Podman automatically updates my containers for me.
Because you point to :latest and everything is dockerized and on one machine? How does it know when it’s time to upgrade?
Yeah only for :latest containers, that’s true. It automatically runs a daily service to check whether there are newer images available. You can turn it off per container if you don’t want it.
One of the nice things about it is that I have containers running under several different users (for security reasons) so that saves me a lot of effort switching to all these users all the time.
It’s a bad practice to use latest tag
Depends on what you want to do. For production with sensitive data, yes it is. For my ytdl and jellyfin? Perfectly fine.
Depends. There are a few things I update by hand, but as long as you have proper backups it’s generally safer to run the latest versions of things automatically if you don’t mind the possibility of breakage (which is very rare in my experience). This is in the context of self-hosting of course, not a business environment.