State of the Union

[beatkind]

The motivation for this fork came from a simple need of an update to date home lab infrastructure. Site node: I am definitely suffering from the enterprise smart home syndrome. As, nobody wants to run a three-year-old piece of software which is barely upgradable by now and holds a ton of security risks. I have to deal with that enough at work. I was always a fan of watchtower, and realising something broke in my setup in the summer of 2024 made me fork the original watchtower repo and update some dependencies to get it working in my setup.

Over the following months, I started to look into the updates provided by renovate and merged them. After sometime as my fork got some traction which I didn't expect. I realised the project seems really to be dead. And now, here we are trying to revive an already thought to be dead.

Future of this fork?

I am by no means someone you would consider a software developer. My home turf is solving problems related to (cloud) infrastructure, drawing architecture diagrams and automating “the cloud” with OpenTofu and Python.

In GO, I so far only contributed little bug fixes or wrote small CLIs automating Toil tasks. Nevertheless, I plan to keep this project alive and use it as a learning opportunity. For now, I upgraded some deprecated code inside watchtower, which is enough in my opinion to keep it alive.

But as the project is by now become a little older, there is a lot more work to come: from fixing long existing bugs to restructure and simplify the code. And last but not least, deciding how to move forward with the also outdated shoutrrr integration.

I am looking forward to implementing, discussing and sometimes yelling at each other ( 😉 ) with you in the future and would like to encourage anyone to contribute to this awesome project.

Other forks

With telling the story of this fork, we can't ignore that other people also came to the same idea, out of the same need. @nicholas-fedor did also put in a lot of work into a fork of watchtower. I already messaged him to see if we can somehow combine the efforts. Let's see what the future holds for us.

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Have a lovely day. With love,

beatkind

[divStar]

I am grateful, that you took on the burden of forking such an important hobby-homelabbers project (in comparison to something way more enterprisey like RenovateBot and the GitOps principle - I would do that for a Kubernetes cluster if I had to, but at home I finally freed myself from running a k8s cluster, because the surrounding noise around my services was becoming way too complex if done properly (see divStar/homelab, it suffers from the metrics server requiring an automated CSR approval, but I can't install it before Cilium etc. etc.).

I don't know if I can or want to dedicate much time to this, but I'd like to kindly ask you to perhaps point somewhere out where the differences to the main project are (I wish @nicolas-fedor would do so, too, though I know everything takes time) and also how to donate at least something to you.

Edit: just saw you're from Germany! Ich würde dich definitiv auf ein Maß oder dergleichen einladen - vielen Dank für das, was du tust! 😃 .