4:37 p.m.
We are working on a new feature of Podman that allows you to run a
service within a container and then have the container automatically
updated when a new image is pushed to a registry.
The full description is given below. We would love to have community
feedback on the ideas, and have people play with it.
```
Add support to auto-update containers running in systemd units as
generated with |podman generate systemd --new|.
|podman restart --auto-update| looks up container with a specified
"io.containers.autoupdate" label (i.e., the auto-update policy).
If the label is present and set to "image", Podman reaches out to the
corresponding registry to check if the image has been updated. We
consider an image to be updated if the digest in the local storage is
different than the one of the remote image. If an image must be
updated, Podman pulls it down and restarts the container. Note that the
restarting sequence relies on systemd.
At container-creation time, Podman looks up the "PODMAN_SYSTEMD_UNIT"
environment variables and stores it verbatim in the container's label.
This variable is now set by all systemd units generated by
|podman-generate-systemd| and is set to |%n| (i.e., the name of systemd
unit starting the container). This data is then being used in the
auto-update sequence to instruct systemd (via DBUS) to restart the unit
and hence to restart the container.
Note that this implementation of auto-updates relies on systemd and
requires a fully-qualified image reference to be used to create the
container. This enforcement is necessary to know which image to
actually check and pull. If we used an image ID, we would not know
which image to check/pull anymore.
Fixes: #3575 <https://github.com/containers/libpod/issues/3575>
Signed-off-by: Valentin Rothberg rothberg(a)redhat.com
<mailto:rothberg@redhat.com>
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https://github.com/containers/libpod/pull/5480