Updating Watchtower

[nicholas-fedor]

How it started

This fork was started as a way to have a version of Watchtower with updated dependencies; however, it's been slowly evolving into a more involved project.

Current Status

This fork is currently stable. Bots provide the majority of updates, which allows me to focus on reviewing known issues for potential fixes, including in Shoutrrr.

Future Plans

Watchtower V2

As I dig into the project, I am increasingly discovering signs of its age.
Watchtower is overdue for a restructuring and rewrite to address longstanding issues, improve its usability, and provide the opportunity for adding missing features.

Feedback

If you have suggestions or ideas for improvement, then please feel free to share.

[nicholas-fedor]

2025-09-03 Update

Current Status

After nearly 6 months, this fork of Watchtower has seen a ton of improvements, including dependency updates, bug fixes, improved functionality, and renovations to the website. The notification library, Shoutrrr, has also undergone similar improvements and continues to be a sidecar to this project. There are still plenty of outstanding issues to tackle, such as a handful of bugs and feature requests; however, the project is still stable and should be backwards-compatible with the upstream version. I am currently following semantic versioning, so version 1.x.x releases are expected to be non-breaking.

Ongoing Development

While my time is currently limited, I still maintain a goal of developing a new major release of Watchtower. This is particularly true when given the major architectural changes needed to provide long-overdue functionality, such as implementing a proper API, providing multi-instance support, UI support, and supporting integrations with third-party applications, such as Dozzle.

In the meantime, support for version 1 will continue, including providing dependency updates, bug fixes, and non-breaking feature additions. My priority is to ensure that bugs are fixed asap. There are several feature requests that I intend to implement, including improving existing functionality.

Shoutrrr's notification support, while ancillary, is also important. I do plan on eventually going through and adding support for more notification services to bring the library closer to par with Apprise.

Contributions

I am always open to suggestions and ideas, particularly if you have any thoughts on the next major release of Watchtower. If you have a fix or feature that you would like to contribute (Shoutrrr included), then do not hesitate to make a pull request!