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Comment by Arnavion | Hacker News Reader

Using it with `:latest` is going to have the problem you described and is not the expected usage. It's more feasible to use it with a release line tag, like `postgres:15`, where you expect updated images to be backward-compatible.

Alternatively, one place where `:latest` would make sense is if they're your images, and you're relying on podman-auto-update to update a fleet of servers to start running the latest version of a service as soon as you push the new image.

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How do people automate this kind of thing, like rolling out a specific image via CI? Generating the systemd files, copying via scp and systemd reload via scripted ssh?

I would like to know this too. Is it stored in a dotfiles-like repo, then cloned, and `stow`ed?

I imagine Ansible could take care of the grunt work here, or something else like it

Come on, scp :)

Ansible / salt / puppet, etc would do this for you in a nicer way. Or maybe Nomad.

Or k8s + ArgoCD would do that from the fact of a commit to a git repo.

I guess in "Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler", scp is too simple for you? But you also mentioned five different beasts to master, so I'm not so sure ;)

If all you need is to update some files, with minimal error handling, scp is fine! (Well, rsync is probably a better option now, but scp would still work.)

As you get progressively bigger, you can consider other options.

I guess it would all depend on the scale.

For my home servers which just run personal things (like a kanban board as a todo list) I just use watchtower[0]. This requires mounting the docker socket into this container, which is not ideal.

In a production environment, id expect pinning of the docker sha and setting docker tags as immutable. Some software projects exist to scan for updates and draft PRs automatically for changes (I can't remember the name of the software but it begins with R).

[0] https://containrrr.dev/watchtower/

> I can't remember the name of the software but it begins with R

Renovate maybe? https://www.mend.io/free-developer-tools/renovate/

I use it for my home server and I love it because it takes care of Dockerfiles too and version changes are saved in git, which means that a rollback is just a matter of switching back to a previous commit and rebuilding your containers (in addition to restoring a backup of your Docker volumes).

You could use Ansible with the podman_container task to keep your containers running.

It varies a lot on what you're using. Postgres in particular is a bugbear because updating dockerized Postgres is hell at best and requires several backups in case you screw up.

OTOH a bog standard python server backend can probably keep running for quite a while on alpine:latest without issue because it's not very reliant on much in terms of strange package availability (maybe old python versions that get deprecated every once in a while).

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