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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Side question: One thing that keeps me from setting up stuff like that is that it’s unclear to me what is involved in keeping it up to date. With Debian packages, I can easily have everything auto-update (e.g. using cron-apt). But for projects like this, it seems one would have to set up some idiosyncratic procedure?

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I've been running AdGuardHome for years, almost since it came out. I prefer keeping it up to date manually after reading the release notes and known issues (by visiting the config page and clicking update if it notifies me that there is a new version) but if you want to automate it you can install the Snap or Docker version or use the API[1] to trigger an auto upgrade. Installing it is easy, there's even an automated installation script now[2] but I prefer to do it manually and run it as a regular user without root permissions. It can run from pretty much anywhere in your filesystem and as any user as long as it has the correct permissions, that's what made me choose it instead of PiHole at first, also the more advanced regex blocking rules.

The easiest way to keep it up to date is probably a Cron script that runs curl to trigger the upgrade API endpoint.

[1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/blob/master/opena...

[2] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome#getting-started

Actually, AdGuard Home checks for updates periodically (unless it’s docker or snap) and can update itself right from the admin panel.

Not sure about this project, but Pi Hole (which is very similar and likely covered under your "stuff like this") has updating built in.

Updating pihole is as simple as: pihole -up

Easy enough to cron up.

So, idiosyncratic in that it's not "apt update", but also pretty nice that it's all self-contained.

A lot of projects are also now available as docker containers, so you can just pull down the latest container version, currently my preference for home hosted things.

> you can just pull down the latest container version

Of course, but how do you automate this? Using Watchtower? Setup instructions never address this aspect. I get the impression that there’s no standard way to auto-update, and most people only update manually?

Unless you want a randomly broken LAN, you should probably pay attention by manually updating things.

Like other mentioned, it's probably best not to autoupdate these kind of apps. For example, I run a pihole in an old raspberry pi 2b and the latest docker image update broke it and I had to revert. Imagine if you're in the middle of something important and suddenly your network is broken and you had to drop everything to fix it. Just do regular once a month docker pull and container restart instead.

Yeah, that’s what I suspected, and that is why I probably won’t start using such a setup. With distributions like Debian, you get curated and timely security updates without having to do anything manually for years.

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