I run about 70 containers. I really don’t find it that difficult. I do run a Watchtower fork, but I run it with --run-once --cleanup. I do that once a month after I feel confident that everyone else has done all the beta testing on the new updates for me. So hats off to all you guys who just yolo your updates. You are an invaluable resource to the selfhosting community. Thank you.

As far as Linux updates, I’m running Ubuntu Jammy so those updates don’t usually introduce breaking changes and I complete them as they become available. I use Portainer, but I am unaware of any auto—update features for Docker containers. You can feed it a new yaml and it will replace or recreate the container based on that yaml, but it doesn’t do it automatically. Portainer is just a handy way to consolidate all your container administration in one place in lieu of using the terminal.

There are other options to updating your containers like WUD, or similar. They will alert you that there is an update, but you have to manually initiate the update. Anecdotally, I’ve only encountered one breaking change and that was when Portainer updated, but was incompatible at the time with the current version of Docker, or something like that. Memory is foggy this morning. It took about an hour to find a fix, and implement it, so it wasn’t an excruciating change up.