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Introduction

Deprecation Notice

Watchtower v2 Legacy Notification Deprecation

Watchtower has a number of legacy notification configuration options that will be removed with the release of Watchtower v2:

Migration to the NOTIFICATION URL with the appropriate Shoutrrr URL scheme is strongly recommended.

Use Watchtower's CLI migration tool to help convert legacy email configurations to Shoutrrr URLs or use the Shoutrrr Playground to help convert configurations for other services to Shoutrrr URLs.

Overview

By default, Watchtower monitors all containers running on the Docker daemon it connects to (typically the local daemon, configurable via the --host flag).

To limit monitoring to specific containers, provide their names as arguments when starting Watchtower.

services:
    watchtower:
        command: nginx redis
        image: ghcr.io/sidneyojr/watchtower:latest
        volumes:
            - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

docker run -d \
    --name watchtower \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    --restart unless-stopped \
    ghcr.io/sidneyojr/watchtower \
    nginx redis
  • In the above example, Watchtower monitors only the nginx and redis containers, ignoring others.

To run a single update attempt and exit, use the run-once configuration option.

services:
    watchtower:
        command: nginx redis
        environment:
            WATCHTOWER_RUN_ONCE: true
        image: ghcr.io/sidneyojr/watchtower:latest
        volumes:
            - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

docker run --rm \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    ghcr.io/sidneyojr/watchtower \
    --run-once \
    nginx redis
  • This command triggers an update attempt for "nginx" and "redis" containers, displays debug output, and removes the Watchtower container upon completion.

Note

Regex patterns are supported. See Regex Pattern Matching for details.

General Options

Help

Displays documentation for supported flags.

            Argument: --help
Environment Variable: N/A
                Type: N/A
             Default: N/A

Health Check

Returns a success exit code for Docker HEALTHCHECK, verifying another process is running in the container.

            Argument: --health-check
Environment Variable: None
                Type: N/A
             Default: N/A

Note

Intended solely for Docker HEALTHCHECK. Do not use on the main command line.