renovate VS whats-up-docker

This month, I gave a talk with my Zenika colleague Lise at the DevoxxFR conference about Renovate and Dependabot, two great tools to help you automatize and upgrade your dependencies.

There is no built-in Renovate Bot on a self-hosted GitLab. What can we do to set it up and enjoy all the benefits of automatic dependency updates?

> Yes, it is awesome until you have to sysadmin it, apply updates, patch it, fix security holes, etc. I am not saying all self-hosted solutions are like that. There are exceptions. However, the majority of open-source self-hosted solutions require a lot of extra work.

I'm currently self-hosting 10 different applications on my local server, which represents everything I've ever seen that looked fun or useful to me. Every one of them had a Docker image with an example compose file, which means updating them just requires periodically running Renovate [0] on the repo that stores all my compose files and then running a script that docker compose pulls the updates. It takes maybe 10 minutes every other week, and is actually kinda fun.

It helps that all the apps are only accessible from within my VPN, so I'm not too worried about fixing security updates within a tiny time window.

[0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate

This is a big deal! Where did you read this? I found:

https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/discussions/26917

Renovate is an automated dependency management tool that can be used to keep your dependencies up-to-date. It can be configured to automatically create pull requests to update your dependencies, and it supports a wide range of package managers and platforms.

To get started with Mend Renovate, the comprehensive official documentation provides detailed instructions on installation, configuration, and best practices. Additionally, the Mend Renovate community forum offers a platform for users to connect, share experiences, and access the collective knowledge base.

It is a good practice to keep software up to date. To track changes in upstream software, we can utilize automatic dependency tracking systems such as Dependabot or Renovate. This is a broad topic and requires a separate article to be covered. If you would like to read about it, please vote in the comments section below.

So do other forges: I have Renovate [0] set up on my self-hosted Forgejo and it's worked great so far.

[0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate

You can ease some of the burden for yourself though using tooling. If you are using GitHub, dependabot can be configured to make automatic PRs to your repo whenever there are dependencies to update. If you're not a GitHub user, you can use renovate which even supports self hosting.

We use What's Up Docker [1] to monitor for new versions of docker containers that are created by others (eg. self hosted apps).

For containers we create ourselves, we automatically rebuild them each night which pulls the latest security updates.

[1] https://github.com/fmartinou/whats-up-docker

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.

I’m going to look into this soon since it seems a bit more accessible: https://github.com/fmartinou/whats-up-docker

A combination of https://github.com/fmartinou/whats-up-docker and docker compose

Might take a look at what's up docker https://github.com/fmartinou/whats-up-docker

I haven't tried it yet but this project aims to make updating docker containers a lot easier instead of just blindly trusting pull cronjobs or watchtower to work, apparently depending on the registry it can differentiate between minor/major updates and handle them differently: https://github.com/fmartinou/whats-up-docker

https://github.com/fmartinou/whats-up-docker Better than WatchTower IMO