I’m running a Docker-based homelab that I manage primarily via Portainer, and I’m struggling with how to handle container updates. At first, I had all containers pulling latest, but I thought maybe this was a bad idea as I could end up updating a container without intending to. So, I circled back and pinned every container image in my docker-compose files.

Then I started looking into how to handle updates. I’ve heard of Watchtower, but I noticed the Linuxserver.io images all recommend not running Watchtower and instead using Diun. In looking into it, I learned it will notify you of updates based on the tag you’re tracking for the container, meaning it will never do anything for my containers pinned to a specific version. This made me think maybe I’ve taken the wrong approach.

What is the best practice here? I want to generally try to keep things up to date, but I don’t want to accidentally break things. My biggest fear about tracking latest is that I make some other change in a docker-compose and update the stack which pulls latest for all the container in that stack and breaks some of them with unintended updates. Is this a valid concern, and if so, how can I overcome it?