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Using Watchtower To Refresh SQL Server Containers

Andrew Pruski explains how to use Watchtower to keep your SQL Server Docker containers up to date:

The databases that I store in my container image are updated on a weekly basis and currently, the process to update our containers is manual. Once the updated image has been created, the existing running containers are dropped and new ones created from the updated image.

But what if we could automatically refresh our containers with the updated image? If we could do that then the only process that’s manual is updating the image. We would no longer have to worry about any containers running SQL instances with databases that are out of date.

Luckily, there’s a way to do this and it’s accessible via an image on the Docker Hub called Watchtower. What Watchtower does is monitor the Docker Hub and if there’s an update to an image it will automatically refresh all running containers that are on the same host.

Read on for a step-by-step solution.