The Watchtower project has been officially archived and is no longer under active maintenance. The GitHub repository was switched to read-only status on December 17, 2025, marking the end of development for one of the most widely used Docker container auto-update tools.
It has long been used to automatically monitor running containers and pull updated images when new versions are published, making it a common component in many self-hosted and small-scale Docker deployments.
The announcement was made by one of Watchtower’s core maintainers in the project’s GitHub Discussions section, stating that they no longer actively use Docker and have lost both the time and interest required to continue maintaining Watchtower. As a result, they decided to archive the repository rather than leave it in a partially maintained state.
Nextcloud has decided to use the following fork, which seemed good enough for me as well: https://github.com/nicholas-fedor/watchtower