For a few years now I've grumbled at updating Docker images in my Nomad homelab. Nomad isn't as popular as Kubernetes or Docker Compose and isn't supported in Dependabot.

Eventually I found this comment

I didn't think this was a great solution to my problem as I split up the registry from the repo/image so that I can pull images from my own repository. This solves the problem of Dependabot updating images though!

There was also an annoyance that I still need to copy these images into my Docker Registry. I've been using regclient's regctl image copy command as part of a Nomad job that makes this a bit easier.

Tada

If the Dockerfile now has a FROM [IMAGE] in the service directory the deploy process now looks like:

• awk the image out awk '/FROM/ {print $2}' Dockerfile
• Dispatch the regctl job with the IMAGE
• Deploy the service job passing in the IMAGE as a variable.

Dependabot doesn't seem to do great with monorepos without lots of copying.

Renovate does though!

Finally, a service that can autoupdate!

Merges on Github do not automatically deploy to my homelab so the final deploy takes 2 more commands to deploy (git pull and bash deploy) but this no longer requires any manual commits!