In December, the authors of decided to archive their own project.

There are a few forks out there - unfortunately I know nothing about them so can't really vouch for their legitimity. If you want to continue using Watchtower, please assess them yourself without switching. A few of the active forks I've looked at are full of AI slop and while they might work, I wouldn't advice using any of them.

This is not a good way to end a project. The original authors recommend looking at Kubernetes instead. For many users, this is not an option. They need a drop-in replacement for Watchtower which keeps their docker containers updated.

One fedizen wrote that this is a popular fork but he did not test it himself:
github.com/nicholas-fedor/watc
Is this one of the forks that is afflicted with ?

GitHub screenshot:

simskij on Dec 17, 2025
Maintainer

It is with a heavy heart, and some sense of relief, that I'd like to announce that we are looking to archive containrrr/watchtower. Neither @piksel, nor I, are big users of docker anymore, and frankly lost interest (and time) in maintaining the project.

There are a few forks out there - unfortunately I know nothing about them so can't really vouch for their legitimity. If you want to continue using Watchtower, please assess them yourself without switching. A few of the active forks I've looked at are full of AI slop and while they might work, I wouldn't advice using any of them.

With that said, the separate shoutrrr project will remain active for the time being.

Thank you for this time, and for showing such a overwhelming amount of interest in the project! It's really been a fun ride!

Best,
@simskij and @piksel
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