How to Set Up Watchtower — Automated Docker Container Updates
Keeping Docker containers up to date is one of those chores that sounds simple but quickly becomes a time sink when you’re running a dozen self-hosted services. Miss an update and you might leave a security hole open for weeks. That’s where Watchtower comes in — a lightweight container that monitors your running Docker containers, detects new image versions, and automatically pulls and restarts them for you. 💡 This article contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more. Watchtower has been a staple of the homelab community for years, and for good reason: it’s dead simple to configure, surprisingly flexible, and it runs entirely inside Docker itself. This guide covers everything from a basic one-shot update run to a fully configured, notification-enabled automatic update setup — including how to exclude containers you don’t want touched. ...