Perpetual Rocket.Chat Develop Deployment

Since joining Rocket.Chat last year I’ve been having to deploy it uncountable times, multiple times in a single day even. One of the most critical things, is needing to check community issues on latest develop branch (to make sure it’s not already fixed) everytime before funneling to product. So it was a lot of re-deploying every few days.

We do have a develop tagged docker image, but to actually be on the latest develop I’d need to re-pull it every once in a while, and that doesn’t really help much.

I wanted an instance, that is always on the latest develop branch.

A solution you might think of is a simple shell script with a systemd service. True. But, luckily, I came across Watchtower , and that seemed pretty neat.

So now, I’ll be documenting how to keep a perpetual develop running instance of Rocket.Chat ;)

It’s not just Rocket.Chat, you can use Watchtower with any OCI image, just make sure the tag you’re targeting is not specific to patch (like target :4.2 instead of :4.2.3 to actually see a difference).

Install Docker & Docker Compose

curl -L https://get.docker.com | sh

Deploy Rocket.Chat

Head over to this pull request to grab the compose file (only support compose v2 FYI).

Before deploying, add a label to the rocketchat service;

com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable: "true"

This will tell Watchtower to keep track of this service.

Deploy Watchtower

Copy the following compose file to a diff location (or save with a diff name?).

version: '3.0'

services:
    watchtower:
        image: containrrr/watchtower:1.3.0
        volumes: [/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro]
        command: --label-enable --cleanup

It’s a pretty simple template. You can change the tag if you wish. Do not forget the --cleanup arg, or else you’ll run out of storage pretty soon :p.

Now just run compose [-f <filename?>] up -d for each template.

Your instance will now be always on latest develop.

For more information, read Watchtower’s official documentation :)