Coming from Watchtower?

Watchtower was archived in December 2025. freshdock is a from-scratch successor, so the concepts map closely but the spelling differs. This page translates the labels and flags you already know. For a feature scorecard against Watchtower, see freshdock.dev/watchtower-alternative.

The biggest difference: freshdock is opt-in. Watchtower updates every container unless you exclude it; freshdock ignores every container unless you set freshdock.enable=true. An enabled container with no explicit mode defaults to watch (detect and notify, never restart), so nothing is recreated until you ask with a mode like live or nightly. One env var flips this back, see keeping Watchtower’s opt-out model.

Config is environment-first, like Watchtower: fleet-wide settings, registry credentials, run flags, and notification targets are all environment variables, so a container deployment needs no config file. Notification targets take a shoutrrr-style URL, so WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATION_URL=discord://token@id becomes FRESHDOCK_NOTIFY_OPS_URL=discord://token@id almost verbatim. See the configuration reference.

Keep your labels

freshdock reads the com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.* labels themselves, so an existing fleet usually needs no relabelling: swap the updater container and go. A freshdock.* label always wins when both are present, so you can migrate label-by-label at your own pace.

What’s honoured directly:

Not supported, logged once and ignored: no-pull, depends-on, scope, lifecycle.pre-check / post-check. freshdock always pulls before recreate and has no per-cycle check hooks. Dependency ordering is not read from the Watchtower label: inside a Docker Compose project freshdock reads Compose’s own depends_on graph instead, and rolls the project out as one unit. See Compose projects.

Keeping Watchtower’s opt-out model

Set FRESHDOCK_WATCH_ALL=true (or [settings] watch_all = true) and freshdock treats every running container as enabled unless it opts out, the way Watchtower did. Pair it with FRESHDOCK_DEFAULT_MODE to say how those containers update; without it they land on watch and nothing is recreated.

services:
  freshdock:
    image: ghcr.io/turbootzz/freshdock:latest
    command: ["run"]
    environment:
      FRESHDOCK_WATCH_ALL: "true"         # every container, unless it opts out
      FRESHDOCK_DEFAULT_MODE: "nightly"   # 04:00 daily, in place of a global WATCHTOWER_SCHEDULE
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
    restart: unless-stopped

  db:
    image: postgres:16
    labels:
      - "com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=false"   # still an exclusion

The exclusion labels you already have keep working: com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=false, freshdock.enable=false, and freshdock.mode=off all opt a container back out. Explicit freshdock.* labels are unaffected: a freshdock.mode=weekly label still wins over FRESHDOCK_DEFAULT_MODE.

freshdock excludes its own container from this, so it never tries to update itself. Detection and the custom-hostname caveat are covered in watching every container.

Label translation

If you prefer clean labels, or need the finer-grained knobs, this is the native spelling:

Flag / environment translation

A worked example

Watchtower (global daily updates, one excluded container, Discord notifications):

docker run -d --name watchtower \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -e WATCHTOWER_SCHEDULE="0 0 4 * * *" \
  -e WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATION_URL="discord://token@id" \
  containrrr/watchtower

services:
  db:
    labels:
      - "com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=false"

The freshdock equivalent: schedule and notify opt-in move onto the containers as labels, and the Discord target is a single env var, with no file at all.

services:
  freshdock:
    image: ghcr.io/turbootzz/freshdock:latest
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
    environment:
      # near-verbatim from WATCHTOWER_NOTIFICATION_URL=discord://token@id
      - "FRESHDOCK_NOTIFY_OPS_URL=discord://<token>@<id>"
      - "FRESHDOCK_NOTIFY_OPS_TRIGGERS=succeeded,failed"
    command: ["run"]
  app:
    image: ghcr.io/example/app:latest
    labels:
      - "freshdock.enable=true"
      - "freshdock.mode=nightly"      # 04:00 daily by default
      - "freshdock.notify=true"
  db:
    image: postgres:16
    # no freshdock.* labels, so it is ignored entirely (no need to "disable" it)

See examples/compose/ for complete stacks that pass docker compose config.