fix(server): switch to maintained watchtower fork

[ohnorobo]

Fix for #1684

containrrr/watchtower is no longer maintained, and has a breaking issue at containrrr/watchtower#2122

https://github.com/nicholas-fedor/watchtower is the new maintained fork the community is moving to.

[ohnorobo]

The PR name check is failing with a Error: Cache service responded with 400 issue. I'm not yet sure is this is an intermittent failure, or some issue that cropped up in the Jigsaw-Code -> OutlineFoundation transition.

[fortuna]

Is this trusted? Who is Nicholas Fedor?

See OutlineFoundation/outline-apps#2690

[fortuna]

Looks like we are using a deprecated action. It doesn't seem to be intermittent.

[ohnorobo]

Is this trusted? Who is Nicholas Fedor?

See OutlineFoundation/outline-apps#2690

The fork has 2.2k stars (original repo 24.2k stars, but it now says "This repository was archived by the owner on Dec 17, 2025. It is now read-only.") and is widely discussed in bugs as the alternative people are moving to containrrr/watchtower#2122

[ohnorobo]

Looks like we are using a deprecated action. It doesn't seem to be intermittent.

It's the same action we're using on outline-apps though, which was definitely working very recently.

https://github.com/OutlineFoundation/outline-apps/blob/master/.github/workflows/pull_request_checks.yml#L52

[ohnorobo]

The CI checks are now fixed.

[fortuna]

If we are going to change the image, we should at a minimum introduce a redirector to allow for future migrations without disruption.

In any case, the right place to fix this is in the outline-apps repo, where the Manager lives. This location is deprecated. It was kept for backwards-compatibility. We might be able to delete it at this point.

[ohnorobo]

If we are going to change the image, we should at a minimum introduce a redirector to allow for future migrations without disruption.

In any case, the right place to fix this is in the outline-apps repo, where the Manager lives. This location is deprecated. It was kept for backwards-compatibility. We might be able to delete it at this point.

I also opened OutlineFoundation/outline-apps#2699 which updates this in outline-apps. Although I think it would be a good idea to update it here too as long as this file still exists, since anyone who somehow ends up using this install script will otherwise have broken watchtower experience. #1684 has 9 👍, so people are hitting this in the wild.

I don't think it's a good idea for us to introduce a redirector

• existing installs from containrrr/watchtower are not broken (they already have the old watchtower code downloaded in their docker image) only users attempting a fresh install using this script after ~11.11.2025, or manually upgrading an existing docker install to docker >= 29.0.0 will see the issue.
• running a redirector requires running an active server, when we need to be reducing the amount of infra we have to actively maintain.
• presumably we would run it under docker.getoutline.org, but that introduces a point of failure for people trying to run installs in places where getoutline.org is blocked, similar to what we're seeing in new CLI module path issues outline-sdk#571 Instead we want to keep relying on installing from the highest-collateral-damage infra we can use, which in this case is docker.io.