shepherd VS Diun

Since watchtower doesn't support Docker Swarm I've come across shepherd but the author has stated that he wont be maintaining the project anymore which makes me reluctant to use it.

Shepherd for those of that run docker swarm.

Not at production (there are strict versioned images), but personally I use Shepherd in my distributed Docker Swarm (many hosts in different locations, even different architectures). I wonder why people say about some terrible issues. I must be very lucky: for over a year usage I've had only single one problem when service wasn't properly restarted (I remember it was Traefik). The only services excluded from auto-update are PostgreSQL and MongoDB (MariaDB works fine with auto updates).

Because all my Docker services are running in Docker Swarm I use similar project shepherd (available also at dockerhub). Not many features, but extremely easy to set up and it does its job (check, download and restart any service when new image is available, so I don't need to care about program updating at all).

I've used this for years

Thanks, I used to use it. I moved to using diun to just notify of updates but not apply them though.

https://crazymax.dev/diun/ and docker compose

Similar to Watchtower but without the option to auto-update containers, just notifying is diun. But imo it does that better and more reliable than Watchtower does. You can get notified by Email, Discord, Pushover, Telegram and many more options.

If your apps are container images, then there are tools like diun, watchtower and whatsupdocker, those can watch the image repository (like Docker Hub) and notify you if a new/updated image has been found. Some can even download and auto-update for you, but that comes at some risk of course.

You might want to have a look at https://crazymax.dev/diun/ which is purpose built for what you're trying to do (notify when an update is available, but not install).

Watchtower is inferior to a project like DIUN this way. Because with double you can actually be notified by newer image versions and act accordingly. But automatic updates (which latest is aswell) are bad practice.

diun is very similar to that, but it doesnt auto-update, just notifies but does that very well imo.

I use https://crazymax.dev/diun/ to send notifications of new images. I also hook it into webbooks with CI for mirroring images, but you should be able to use something like portainer webhooks to auto pull images.