Part 11 — How I Run My Entire Digital Life on a Raspberry Pi: Keep Your Containers Fresh with Watchtower
Keeping your Docker containers up to date is crucial for security, reliability, and making sure you benefit from the latest improvements — but manually updating containers can be tedious and easy to forget. That’s where Watchtower comes in! Watchtower automatically monitors your running containers and updates them in the background whenever new images are available. Even better, you can integrate Watchtower with Gotify to receive instant notifications whenever an update occurs. In this section, we’ll show you how to automate container updates with Watchtower and stay informed in real time with Gotify, making Docker maintenance effortless and keeping your stack secure and current.
Watchtower
Watchtower is a lightweight, open-source tool designed to automate the process of keeping your Docker containers up to date. It runs as its own Docker container and continuously monitors your running containers for updates to their underlying images. When a new version of an image becomes available — whether from Docker Hub or a private registry — Watchtower automatically pulls the latest image, gracefully stops the old container, and restarts it with the updated image