I’ve run into an issue and after like 10 hours of testing different apps, I’m lost…
I currently have about 10, maybe 15 stacks in my environment. Nginx, ddclient, navidrome, jellyfin, vaultwarden, tandoor, paperless, metube… To name a few.
It’s so many that I find it difficult to stay on top of updates permanently. I like how home assistant manages all my integration and addon updates with a small popup and detailed description inside, and an update button.
I want the same for my Docker environment. I don’t need extensive monitoring with uptime, ram, CPU, disk space and what not.
I want to use pinned versions for critical services, like vaultwarden, and manually update within Major versions (1.1 → 1.2, not 2.0) with a simple click of a button. No automatic updates required at all. All this across 4 Docker hosts. I’m not using any sort of orchestration.
I have tried WUD, watchtower is discontinued, have tried dockge, looked into dockmon, tested CUP (by sergi0g). None offers this option.
Do I really have to dive into vibe coding to set this up myself? How can this be so difficult in 2026?
You might want to take a look at https://dockhand.pro. Which, from what I heard, allows easy image updating, and on top uses grype/trify for cve analysis of the images.
Have you considered maintaining your stack configurations in git repos, and just use Renovate for version updates? Renovate detects various dependencies and create features branches, merge requests (that hopefully that trigger pipelines), and even automerge them. Usually people end up automerging everything, except major versions.
Thanks for bringing dockhand up. That was my newest attempt, but I couldn’t figure out how it was able to edit my Docker-compose.yam.
Also I only received “couldn’t fetch” errors for all my stacks. I can dive deeper into this solution though, if you course, and try to fix this issue.
Do you have experience with dockhand? How does it update composed files?
Update regarding Renovate: I’ve heard about it, but managing my versions in Git? I don’t know … It sounds a bit complicated to me :-/
I tried Dockhand, and it showed me something like this:
No more info on what version this is. How am I to judge if I should install this or not? I clicked on the tiny update button and it immediately updated the application without any more questions. If this had been a database update, I’d have been f***d
I don’t use UIs. I find them cumbersome to use. I am not patient enough for clickOps.
I doubt it updates the compose file. It is more likely to ony update the images (according to
the autoupdate docs)
Managing the compose files in git, and leverage renovate to update image version. It gets even more complicated: it requires a supported git flavor, and you will need a ci runner as well. It is one of those situations where you have to put in a lot of effort so you can be lazy forever, instead of having small regular effort.
This is something where renovate shines: you can create precise rules on what version ranges you want updates being applied for.
People are raving about Dockhand everywhere, so it can’t be that bad. But i can see how this is a fail for Postgres images, where every minor version uses a different database folder, and requires a migration. It was never about minor version. Starting with postgres 10, the first number (eg 10.y.z) was considered major, while in version <10, the first two numbers (e.g. 9.6.z) where considered a major version.
It seems Percona is maintaining a watchtower repo and Docker images. I don’t know if they will continue this further in the future or if it satisfies your goals.
How can this be so difficult in 2026? 
I clicked on the tiny update button and it immediately updated the application without any more questions. If this had been a database update, I’d have been f***d