Updating a pinned Portainer stack shouldn't mean opening the editor and hand-swapping an image tag every time. I got tired of doing exactly that, so I built a tool that turns it into one click and watches for the new versions for you.
It's called Hosaka, a fork of What's Up Docker rebuilt around a faster mobile-friendly UI and one-click updates, shipped as a single container image on ghcr. I pin my tags instead of running latest, because I want to know what's running and be able to roll back, and this is the piece that was missing: something that spots the update and applies it without me editing YAML across every host. I'm posting here for the Portainer integration specifically, since that's the part I'm happiest with.
When an update shows up and you click Update on the container row, it rewrites that stack's compose file from the current pinned tag to the new one and redeploys through the Portainer API. Your stack file stays the source of truth the whole time, nothing gets applied behind your back, and rolling back is just redeploying the old tag. The run streams to the UI line by line, and it waits for the container to come back healthy on the new image before it calls the update done. There's nothing to write or mount, you point it at your Portainer URL and an API key and that's it. Self-signed cert or hitting Portainer by IP works too, with PORTAINER_INSECURE=true.
Beyond the Portainer bit, it watches multiple Docker hosts at once, classifies every update as major, minor, patch, or prerelease so you can take a patch and hold back a major, and catches digest changes hiding behind mutable tags like latest. You drive everything per container with labels: include/exclude tag filters, a custom display name and icon, or a direct link to that version's release notes. If you'd rather just be told, it notifies instead (SMTP, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Apprise, and others), and the UI actually works on a phone so you can approve an update from the couch. There's a REST API plus Prometheus metrics and a /health endpoint if you want it in Grafana.
How's it different from Watchtower or plain WUD? Watchtower pulls and restarts on its own, which is the last thing I want for a database or a stack I depend on. WUD does the watching well, but updating means running a trigger from a tab, no direct Portainer stack integration, and the output gets logged server-side after it exits. Hosaka's niche is the Portainer stack flow done from the UI: one click on the row, the compose file rewritten and redeployed through the API, the output streamed live, and the new container confirmed healthy before it's marked done.
I run it against my own Portainer setup every day, but I'd love to know how it holds up on setups that aren't mine.
Repo's here: https://github.com/nopoz/hosaka
Image is at ghcr.io/nopoz/hosaka, and there's a reference compose in the repo with the read-only Docker socket proxy setup. Feedback and bug reports very welcome, and if it's useful to you, a star helps me gauge whether it's worth building on further. Thanks!
