Podman: Auto update containers with podman

[viggy96]

Is this a BUG REPORT or FEATURE REQUEST? (leave only one on its own line)

/kind feature

Description
Is there a method of automatically updating containers when a new version is available in the repository? I use watchtower to achieve this currently with docker, and that container requires mounting the docker unix socket to work, which of course, won't work for podman. Is there another method of achieving this, or is this feature on the roadmap?

[rhatdan]

Would a cron job/systemd timer work for this? Not sure what watchtower is, but it seems line it must be just checking periodically and pulling new images.

[rhatdan]

After reading https://hub.docker.com/r/v2tec/watchtower/ it looks like this would be fairly easy to implement via a systemd timer.

The issue would be if you wanted to make this general purpose. Launch a watcher on an existing container. Being able to get the command line executed, and gernate the CLI command based on it.

[viggy96]

Yeah, I want this to be general purpose for all my containers. Which is why I like that watchtower container so much, its a very simple solution to auto update all my containerised applications.

[abitrolly]

Docker added --pull=... option to run recently. Will that help https://github.com/docker/cli/pull/1498 ?

[rhatdan]

I don't think this will help, although it is something we should add to Podman. @QiWang19 Could you add --pull for podman run and create.

[rhatdan]

Or @abitrolly If you wanted to add the support that would be great also.

[mheon]

This is being worked on.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue had no activity for 30 days. In the absence of activity or the "do-not-close" label, the issue will be automatically closed within 7 days.

[rhatdan]

@QiWang19 What is the state of this issue?

[QiWang19]

@QiWang19 What is the state of this issue?

I haven't started working on this issue.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue had no activity for 30 days. In the absence of activity or the "do-not-close" label, the issue will be automatically closed within 7 days.

[mheon]

Should be made substantially easier with the patch from @vrothberg to display the original creation command in podman inspect

[github-actions[bot]]

A friendly reminder that this issue had no activity for 30 days.

[delight]

Yeah, I want this to be general purpose for all my containers. Which is why I like that watchtower container so much, its a very simple solution to auto update all my containerised applications.

In watchtower the behavior configureable over labels:

https://containrrr.github.io/watchtower/container-selection/

[viggy96]

@delight That's not what I want though. I want to have podman update all my containers just like watchtower does by default.

[delight]

@viggy96 anyways I think you are addressing your request to the wrong project though. IMO it's rather an implementation detail of watchtower. Right now watchtower is accessing the docker api via go. It's rather up to watchtower to support podman additionally.

[viggy96]

@delight I was just using watchtower as an example. I'm not expecting podman guys to support watchtower. I was asking for a similar solution that would work for podman. @vrothberg has already taken up this issue, so I'd say its very relevant to this project.

[mrguitar]

+1 to having a mechanism to generate timers for this. That would be great.

[rhatdan]

@vrothberg any progress on this?

[vrothberg]

No. The v2 API has a higher priority. I will tackle it after my PTO along with the open systemd issues.

[vrothberg]

I opened https://github.com/containers/libpod/pull/5480 to support auto-updating containers. Feel free to play with it and provide feedback.