docker – Just another Linux geek

Automatically updating containers with Docker

Running something in a container using Docker or Podman is cool, but maybe you want an automated way to always run the latest container? Using the :latest tag alone does not to this, that just pulls the latest container at the time. You could have a cronjob that just always pulls the latest containers and restarts the container but then if there’s no update you have an outage for no reason.

It’s not too hard to write a script to pull the latest container and restart the service only if required, then tie that together with a systemd timer.

To restart a container you need to know how it was started. If you have only one container then you could just hard-code it, however it gets more tricky to manage if you have a number of containers. This is where something like runlike can help!

OwnTracks recorder in a container on Fedora with Let’s Encrypt and nginx

OwnTracks Recorder is a web application which maps locations over time. Generally, it connects to an MQTT server and subscribes to owntracks/+ topics for any location updates, but it also has a built in function to receive updates over HTTP.

I have been using OwnTracks with MQTT for a while, but found it to be too unreliable on Android (disconnects in the background and doesn’t reconnect nicely). Using HTTP is supposed to be more reliable, so this is how I set it up. The idea is to use OwnTracks on Android to post directly to the OwnTracks recorder over HTTP instead of MQTT and have recorder post the MQTT messages on our behalf using LUA scripts (for Home Assistant).

Friends is an important feature (to let members of the family see where eachother is located) and fortunately it is supported in HTTP mode (but it requires a little bit more configuration).

Running a non-root container on Fedora with podman and systemd (Home Assistant example)

Similar to my post about running Home Assistant on Fedora in Docker, this is about using podman instead and integrating the container as a service with systemd. One of the major advantages to me is the removal of Docker daemon and integration with the rest of the system including management of dependencies like regular services.

This assumes you’ve just installed Fedora server and have a local user with sudo privileges. Let’s also install some SELinux tools.

sudo dnf install -y /usr/sbin/semanage

Create non-root user

Let’s create a specific user to run the Home Assistant service.