Rockon Watchtower help

[greyson1973 (Mike)]

I got my Rockstor updated to the newest version. In the process, my Emby Rockon is now reporting there is an update available. I tried to research and saw people suggesting the Rockon Watchtower can handle upgrading the Emby Server. I tried reading the forum and the linked “arguments” file and I am completely lost. However, I am not adverse to trying to follow instructions. So, I installed Watchtower and was immediately greeted by a screen requesting info I have no idea what to put in. I got this

What does “Filter by label enabled” mean and what do I put in that field?

The field “Scheduling (CRON format)” kind of makes sense to me. It’s asking when to run the update, right? If I am right, then it midnight on the first day of the month is 0 0 1 * * Is this correct and what I put in this field?

Last is “Remove old images after updates” Is this a simple yes or no? The help seems to lay out a true or false value. If I am understanding the help screen, to say yes I would put “true” in this field and it would remove the old version of the software after the update completes. Is that right?

Lastly, I was reading in thsi thread

Emby rockon update (2)

Hello to the community. I recently updated my Rockstor installation from Centos to Opensuse and it’s going fine. On Centos I had Emby installed outside of Rockstor, but with the upgrade I decided to go with the Rockon version which works pretty good as well. I wanted to know whether the steps mentioned by @Flox here are still relevant or there has been any development I have missed. With the previous installation, updating Emby was as simple as shutting down the server and running installati…

that a label needs to be added to Emby for Watchtower is work correctly. I tried to follow the example in the thread. So, I set Emby to look like this

Did I get this right? If not, what do I need to fix?

[wdc (Bill)]

What you show for Emby matches my Emby settings and Watchtower is upgrading as expect.

For reference, here is my Watchtower config. Note that if you give it a “bad” cron schedule, it won’t give an error (it just won’t run when expected).

Check the Watchtower docs but I believe “Filter by label enable” means that it will only update containers that include the referenced label. i.e., if you don’t add the label to a Rockon, it won’t get updated by Watchtower. That’s from memory anyway.

Good luck!

[Hooverdan (Dan W.)]

I have very similar settings (my CRON schedule checks once a week). The CLEANUP parameter is to ensure previous images of that Rockon are removed. Otherwise they can hang around (there might be a scenario for that, where one needs to switch back to an older image, though, while I submitted this set of configurations for the Rockon, I have not had a reason to use a different setting but “true”.
And, yes, what @wdc said about the label is correct. Add it to any Rockon’s that you want periodically checked for updates (and then also updated).

BTW. if you hover over the i (info) icon it usually gives you some information on what to put there (e.g. is it a true/false setting or something else).

[greyson1973 (Mike)]

BTW. if you hover over the i (info) icon it usually gives you some information on what to put there (e.g. is it a true/false setting or something else).

That was the help screen I was referencing. Your right, it gives some info. Not really enough for someone like me who is trying to figure it out. It might be nice if, instead of hover over, that was a slick on that provided the popup info and a link to an article with more detail for people like me. However, that’s another discussion. For now, I set up my first test to see if it work. Will known at midnight.

One more question - If I get the time setting wrong, how do I change it? The only thing I have been able to find is uninstall the rockon and resinstall, but II am thinking there is a better way I just can’t find.

[Hooverdan (Dan W.)]

Well, we do have write-ups for some Rockons submitted by the community,

https://rockstor.com/docs/interface/overview.html#rock-ons-with-write-ups

Watchtower is unfortunately not one of them. But, if you or anyone else reading this feels like contributing, then you can follow the instructions for doing that here:

https://rockstor.com/docs/contribute/contribute_documentation.html

It’s pretty straightforward (meaning, even I was able to do it ).

To your settings question, yes, if you need to change any of the parameters, you will have to uninstall and re-install the Rockon again. Maybe that will become easier to change in the future, but for now that’s how that works. When you created the CRON expression, did you check it against one of those CRON generators, like the one I had put into the Rockon description:

Free Online Cron Expression Generator and Describer - FreeFormatter.com

Only thing to watch out for is that only 6 fields are considered, so no year recurrence can be configured. Chances are when you use one of those that your scheduling will be right. But, of course, if you choose to change it to some other periodicity then you will need to perform the uninstall/re-install.

[greyson1973 (Mike)]

When you created the CRON expression, did you check it against one of those CRON generators, like the one I had put into the Rockon description:

I didn’t. I manually did the conversion and, running my input through the converter, I only made one error… I forgot that CRON was in UTC and I input for it to run at midnight, which is actually 6PM in my time zone. So, I uninstalled and reinstalled setting it for 6AM monthly UTC, which lines up with midnight in my time zone. Now, that will actually kind of be an issue. UTC doesn’t adjust for day light savings… so for 6 months out of the year, it will go off one hour off from my current time. I am currently in CST and in March I will change to CDT, thanks to day light savings." So, right now, I am -6 UTC and in March, I will become -5 UTC. If I remember correctly that means that, starting in march, my Watchtower will run at 1AM my local time, rather then midnight. Howevere, in November, it will return to midnight… I just have to be aware of that

[Hooverdan (Dan W.)]

I think, the CRON is not in UTC in this case, but I might be wrong, because the Rockons always get attached to the same time zone as the Rockstor server (hard-coded in the background as part of the docker run statement so it doesn’t need to be added to the Rockon definition json file). When inspecting the container with docker inspect, I can see this:

            "Binds": [
                "/etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro",
                "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"
            ],

And the watchtower help states that if one defines a timezone the CRON is going to run based on that, and not UTC (at least as I understand it):

https://containrrr.dev/watchtower/arguments/#time_zone

I double-checked mine, the CRON expression I set to every Friday at 4:00am (0 0 4 ? * FRI), and the
docker logs watchtower_official confirms that it checked and ran at 4:00am PST, which is the timezone Rockstor is set up with (well, I guess the log entry had the 4:02 am timestamp, assuming it takes a little bit to get things going and before posting a result):

Here’s an excerpt of a log that I see:

time="2025-02-05T11:28:40-08:00" level=info msg="Watchtower 1.7.1"
time="2025-02-05T11:28:40-08:00" level=info msg="Using no notifications"
time="2025-02-05T11:28:40-08:00" level=info msg="Only checking containers using enable label"
time="2025-02-05T11:28:40-08:00" level=info msg="Scheduling first run: 2025-02-07 04:00:00 -0800 PST"
time="2025-02-05T11:28:40-08:00" level=info msg="Note that the first check will be performed in 40 hours, 31 minutes, 19 seconds"
time="2025-02-07T04:02:11-08:00" level=info msg="Found new linuxserver/plex:latest image (93b9391d5628)"
time="2025-02-07T04:02:14-08:00" level=info msg="Stopping /plex-linuxserver.io (e08705946a25) with SIGTERM"
time="2025-02-07T04:02:47-08:00" level=info msg="Creating /plex-linuxserver.io"
time="2025-02-07T04:02:52-08:00" level=info msg="Removing image 417ebd0bad62"
time="2025-02-07T04:02:57-08:00" level=info msg="Session done" Failed=0 Scanned=9 Updated=1 notify=no

[greyson1973 (Mike)]

I think, the CRON is not in UTC in this case, but I might be wrong, because the Rockons always get attached to the same time zone as the Rockstor server (hard-coded in the background as part of the docker run statement so it doesn’t need to be added to the Rockon definition json file).

Great… another uninstall and reinstall to set it back how I had it LOL

I like your weekly over my monthly, but I prefer midnight on Sunday. So mine became

0 0 0 ? * SUN

If your right, it should run for the first time tonight… Will update this chat in the morning and let you know if it was right.

[greyson1973 (Mike)]

You were right about CRON not using UTC. It ran and updated as it should have. So I am good.

[wdc (Bill)]

Please please please - don’t get me started on daylight savings time. IMHO we need to get on DST or off of it year round.


Cheers, all!

[greyson1973 (Mike)]

I live in Florida and we have it before congress to allow our states

1. Become a single time zone (currently we are CST and EST depending where you are in the state)

and

2. End day light savings for our state.

So far, the federal government has rejected allowing us to do either, but we keep trying (have been trying for 8 years)