How I Update doco-cd with GitHub / Gitea Actions and Renovate

[ronaldheft]

If this is helpful for anyone, I have a simple approach I'm using to version control doco-cd and keep the stack updated with automation. This might be a great alternative to doco-cd managing itself.

1. First, I place my doco-cd compose file in a git repo.
2. Second, I add a renovate.json along with the needed setup for Renovate in my git provider of choice (Gitea).
3. Third, I add a simple bash script to pull the repo changes and update the Docker stack.
4. Finally, I automate the script execution over SSH with a Gitea Action.

After doing the above, my repo structure roughly looks like this:

.
├── .gitea
│   └── workflows
│       └── deploy-remote.yml
├── .gitignore
├── compose.yml
├── renovate.json
└── update-and-restart.sh

renovate.json

{
  "$schema": "https://docs.renovatebot.com/renovate-schema.json",
  "extends": [
    "config:best-practices"
  ],
  "packageRules": [
    {
      "description": "Automerge Docker digest/patch updates after 1 day",
      "matchManagers": ["docker-compose"],
      "matchUpdateTypes": ["digest", "patch"],
      "minimumReleaseAge": "1 day",
      "automerge": true
    }
  ]
}

update-and-restart.sh:

#!/bin/bash
# update-and-restart.sh
# Updates the repo from git and restarts the docker compose stack

set -euo pipefail

REPO_DIR="$(cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd)"
cd "$REPO_DIR"

echo "[INFO] Pulling latest changes from git..."
git pull --rebase

echo "[INFO] Pulling latest images as per compose.yml..."
docker compose pull

echo "[INFO] Recreating and updating the stack..."
docker compose up -d --remove-orphans

echo "[INFO] Pruning unused images..."
docker image prune -f

echo "[INFO] Stack is up to date."

deploy-remote.yml:

name: Deploy Remote Stack

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

concurrency:
  group: deploy-remote
  cancel-in-progress: false

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Run remote update script
        uses: https://github.com/appleboy/ssh-action@0ff4204d59e8e51228ff73bce53f80d53301dee2 # v1.2.5
        with:
          host: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_HOST }}
          username: ${{ secrets.SSH_USER }}
          key: ${{ secrets.SSH_PRIVATE_KEY }}
          script: /opt/docker/doco-cd/update-and-restart.sh

You will need to checkout the git repo on your server for the first time, but after that, updates can be done through the action anytime the main branch is updated.

[kimdre]

Thank you for this guide! 👍

[gitnew12]

Appreciate the writeup. I'm using Renovate + Gitea, and with the recent Doco-CD update with the parallel deployment feature, I am getting some weird behavior, which is probably due to user error on my behalf.

My issue: Renovate creates a PR for each image, and Gitea triggers the Doco-CD webhook for each automerge action (since it's a Push Event) causing Doco-CD to run multiple parallel deployments. Any advice or guidance on how to handle this quirk?