shoe-string-server VS watchtower

I have a very similar system[1] for my personal projects, only I use GitHub actions to push a docker image to ECR and a commit to a config repo bumping the tag. I then have a cronjob to pull the config repo and reconcile using docker compose.

I wouldn't use it for serious stuff, but it's been working great for my random personal projects (biggest gap is if something crashes it'll stay crashed until manual intervention currently)

- [1] https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server/pull/2

For my personal stuff that doesn't get any traffic I cobbled together some scripts to manage containers / SSL here https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server

I don't think I ever got around to making it self healing if a container dies, but it does support gitops style deployments through a cronjob / conf repo similar to argocd

It's been running happily on a <$10 / month aws lightsail instance for a few years now, though tbh I'd still reach for k8s for anything serious

Interestingly this seems like a pretty popular problem to solve.

I made a similar thing recently as well, although with the goal to handle ingress and monitoring out the box as well, whilst still able to run comfortably on a small box.

I took a fairly similar approach, leveraging docker-compose files, and using a single data directory for ease of backup (although it's on my to-do list to split out conf/data).

If there was a way to get a truly slim and easy to setup k8s compatible environment I'd probably prefer that, but I couldn't find anything that wouldn't eat most of my small servers ram

https://github.com/mnahkies/shoe-string-server if you're interested

Related: https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower

> if you're using the docker image, upgrades are a breeze. Just bump the tag on the image, redeploy, and you're done.

Or you could just run Watchtower beside it and it will automatically update your docker containers. https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower If you are OK with automated updates.

So i primarily use containers on my local machine walled off from the internet, so it's not a big concern for me. Watchtower [1] is popular among home server users too which automatically updates containers to the latest image.

For production uses I think companies generally build their own containers. They would have a common base linux container and build the other containers based off that with a typical CI/CD pipeline. So if glibc is patched, it's probably patched in the base container and the others are then rebuilt. You don't have to patch each container individually, just the base. Production also minimizes the scope of containers with nothing installed except what's necessary so they have few dependencies.

[1] https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower

You can use Watchtower (https://containrrr.dev/watchtower/) that solves problem of manual pulling on VPS.

I checked https://containrrr.dev/watchtower/ and Arguments, but I don't understand where to attach that using portainer.

Again, there are options to automate some of the burden here by using tools such as Watchtower.

Have you ever deployed a Docker app on a server, but everytime you push a new version of your image to a Docker registry you need to manually restart your app? If you want to automate this restarting, this blog post is for you! I am now going to show you how you can do this with literally 1 simple command using Watchtower!