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Homelab Journal

Updates

Building a Safe Auto-Update System for Docker After a 2 AM Outage

·1422 words·7 mins
Intermediate Lesson-Learned Tutorial Docker Automation Containers Updates Semaphore Infrastructure
The 2 AM Wake-Up Call # I woke up to find my CI/CD platform had been down for 8 hours. Semaphore, the Ansible automation engine that manages my entire homelab, was stuck in a crash loop: 1 2 3 /usr/local/bin/server-wrapper: line 295: syntax error: unexpected "&&" /usr/local/bin/server-wrapper: line 295: syntax error: unexpected "&&" /usr/local/bin/server-wrapper: line 295: syntax error: unexpected "&&" The same error, repeating every few seconds. The container would start, hit the broken entrypoint script, crash, and restart. Endlessly.

Lesson Learned: Why I Replaced Watchtower with WUD Across My Homelab

·453 words·3 mins
Lesson-Learned Containers Updates Infrastructure Docker Automation
The Problem # Watchtower had been my go-to for automatic Docker container updates across 8+ services. It worked… mostly. But I kept running into issues: Opt-out model is dangerous - Watchtower watches ALL containers by default. I had to remember to add com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=false to containers I didn’t want updated. Forgetting meant surprise updates. No visibility - Updates happened silently at 4 AM. I only knew something updated when it broke. No dashboard, no easy way to see pending updates.