Automatic Update

Why automatic updates?

Simplifier delivers quality updates on daily base. We guarantee the update procedure running without errors by our internal quality process.

If you use a mechanism for updating the simplifier automatically

administrators or devops save a lot of manual operation time
appbuilders can benefit from the latest fixes
the security team ensure that simplifier is up-to-date in terms security related issues

How does it work?

Watchtower is an application that will monitor your running Docker containers and watch for changes to the images that those containers were originally started from. If watchtower detects that an image has changed, it will automatically restart the container using the new image.

Watchtower will pull down your new image, gracefully shut down your existing container and restart it with the same options that were used when it was deployed initially.

Update all Containers

If you want to auto-update all containers on your host, you can run watchtower with default settings

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

Update Simplifier Container only

You can restrict watchtower to update only specific containers like simplifier. To handle this, adjust the start command to

docker run -d --name watchtower -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock containrrr/watchtower <nameofsimplifiercontainer>

Scheduling Automatic Updates

If you want control about the time point for updating the simplifier, you can use the additional schedule command

docker run -d --name watchtower -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro containrrr/watchtower simplifier --cleanup --schedule "0 0 4 * * *"

In this example the update will be done by 4am every day in the morning.

Notification about updates

You can add additional commands to configure the Notification either via

Email (SMTP)
MS Teams over Webhook

Run watchtower as docker-compose file

A comfortable way to define the docker service for automatic updates is to use a docker-compose file instead of the cli commands.

An example with the same options see below:

version: "3"

services:
  watchtower:
    container_name: watchtower
    restart: always
    environment:
      WATCHTOWER_SCHEDULE: 0 0 4 * * *
      TZ: Europe/Brussels
      WATCHTOWER_CLEANUP: "true"
      WATCHTOWER_DEBUG: "false"
    image: containrrr/watchtower
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

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