At one of my clients, who wants everything on-prem, I use gitlab CI with ansible. It took 3 days to setup, and requires thinkering. But all in all, I like the versitility, consistency and transparency of this approach.

If I’d start over again, I’d use pyinfra instead of ansible, but that’s a minor difference.

K3s with flux inside. Fun video from a guy with a nice easy repo from goto conference on YouTube. Might be a bit much but… Not sure of anything for compose and gitops

I do this with semaphore, the below playbook would check out the git repo and reapply the compose file.

• docker_hosts is the host to run this on
• project_dir is where the compose file is on disk

I dont use github, but my own git server not on the internet.

---
- name: Update docker imges
  hosts: "{{ docker_hosts }}"
  gather_facts: false
  tasks:
    - name: Read-write git checkout from github
      ansible.builtin.git:
        repo: git@github.com:yourname/docker.git
        dest: /home/username/git/docker

    - name: Create and start services
      community.docker.docker_compose_v2:
        project_src: "{{ project_dir }}"
        build: never
        pull: always
        state: present
      register: output

    - ansible.builtin.debug:
        var: output.stderr_lines

Wondering, Just after how many containers does ops make sense? I have a dozen containers, I check for updates once a month manually. I update the compose/docker files manually and up my containers. In stages, because my git and my container registry are also containers. Also my dev is my prod env.

Komodo works really well for this and is fairly easy to setup.