I’ve been using Watchtower to manage the updates to my containers via Portainer for a number of months. It works pretty well.

I always had to remember to manually tidy up old images once they had been updated, that is until I discovered the commands below.

The commands

- WATCHTOWER_CLEANUP=true
  - WATCHTOWER_INCLUDE_STOPPED=true
  - WATCHTOWER_REVIVE_STOPPED=false

What do they do?

• WATCHTOWER_CLEANUP=true – This command tells watchtower to delete old images once they’ve been updated.
• WATCHTOWER_INCLUDE_STOPPED=true – This will allow watchtower to update all containers whether they are running or stopped.
• WATCHTOWER_REVIVE_STOPPED=false – This will tell watchtower not to restart stopped containers after updating them.

There we have it some quick commands that will save a lot of time and hassle when dealing with containers.