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Lifecycle hooks

Executing commands before and after updating

Note

These are shell commands executed with sh, and therefore require the container to provide the sh executable.

DO NOTE: If the container is not running then lifecycle hooks can not run and therefore the update is executed without running any lifecycle hooks.

It is possible to execute pre/post-check and pre/post-update commands inside every container updated by watchtower.

  • The pre-check command is executed for each container prior to every update cycle.
  • The pre-update command is executed before stopping the container when an update is about to start.
  • The post-update command is executed after restarting the updated container
  • The post-check command is executed for each container post every update cycle.

This feature is disabled by default. To enable it, you need to set the option --enable-lifecycle-hooks on the command line, or set the environment variable WATCHTOWER_LIFECYCLE_HOOKS to true.

Specifying update commands

The commands are specified using docker container labels, the following are currently available:

Type Docker Container Label
Pre Check com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.pre-check
Pre Update com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.pre-update
Post Update com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.post-update
Post Check com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.post-check

These labels can be declared as instructions in a Dockerfile (with some example .sh files) or be specified as part of the docker run command line:

LABEL com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.pre-check="/sync.sh"
LABEL com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.pre-update="/dump-data.sh"
LABEL com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.post-update="/restore-data.sh"
LABEL com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.post-check="/send-heartbeat.sh"
docker run -d \
--label=com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.pre-check="/sync.sh" \
--label=com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.pre-update="/dump-data.sh" \
--label=com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.post-update="/restore-data.sh" \
someimage --label=com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.post-check="/send-heartbeat.sh" \

Timeouts

The timeout for all lifecycle commands is 60 seconds. After that, a timeout will occur, forcing Watchtower to continue the update loop.

Pre- or Post-update timeouts

For the pre-update or post-update lifecycle command, it is possible to override this timeout to allow the script to finish before forcefully killing it. This is done by adding the label com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.lifecycle.pre-update-timeout or post-update-timeout respectively followed by the timeout expressed in minutes.

If the label value is explicitly set to 0, the timeout will be disabled.

Execution failure

The failure of a command to execute, identified by an exit code different than 0 or 75 (EX_TEMPFAIL), will not prevent watchtower from updating the container. Only an error log statement containing the exit code will be reported.