Suggestion for v3 ngrok container

[LeeThompson]

I run ngrok (2.x at the moment) in docker on a Synology NAS. I do not have easy command line access to docker as Synology has it's own web GUI for it.

So running the ngrok config upgrade can become a 'chicken & egg' problem for some people.

What might be useful is to be able to add an environment variable to the container that would instruct it to start, perform an upgrade of the config and either continue running with the upgraded config or stop (instead of just stopping with an error). (A lot of us in simple environments also have containers set to auto-restart which was quite ugly when Watchtower upgraded my ngrok 2 to ngrok 3 at 4am a few days ago).

Between portainer and setting up SSH access, I can technically get to a docker command prompt to maybe get it to run on a command but I don't have any command line docker experience so it's not something I'm in a rush to do and I figure some other users may be in the same boat, so some kind of method to get the container to do the upgrade for us would be nice to have.

Just a thought, thanks for reading.

[krwenholz]

Thanks for bringing this up @LeeThompson. Can you help me understand how you manage your config? I'm not familiar with Watchtower. The config upgrade is generally pretty simple, so I'm wondering if pointing to the changelog would be more expedient? The number of changes for v2->v3 is pretty limited (most folks will get away with just adding version).

[LeeThompson]

If it's that easy then yeah a changelog or simple how to manually update/prepare for v3 would probably be fine.

I'll try to go over our config...

My wife and I run a number of containers on our Synology (a dozen or so), I do small coding projects (mostly for myself) and my wife has technical interests too. We use ngrok to make it easy to access some of the containers we run from the net over TLS, one to access our ebooks etc. That kind of thing.

Watchtower is a container that performs container updates which I like because updating a container to a new version is a little tedious, especially if you have many of them. It checks to see if any of the container's tags have been updated in the registry, if so it pulls the new image, exports your existing container, deletes it (I do have data/configs mapped to the host volume), re-creates it using the new image and starts the updated container. You can even schedule when it does this.

Of course, this can backfire if a container update is rolled back or requirements change or something in the configuration needs updated or an automatic upgrade script goes wrong. I have been stung by this myself a few times, but overall it's a real time saver.

[krwenholz]

Ah makes sense! Take a gander at the changelog linked and let us know if you have any questions. You're also welcome to write into support@ngrok.com for one of those folks to help, but I'll leave this open until you confirm it was "easy enough".