Auto-update the collector
Once the collector runs on your own box (see Deploy to a VPS), you can have it pull and apply new patch releases on its own. This page sets that up with an opt-in Compose overlay that adds a release-channel pin, Watchtower, and rolling Postgres backups.
Is it really “no interruption”?
For your agents, effectively yes. The SDK’s RemoteCollectorSink buffers telemetry in memory and retries with backoff, and treats HTTP 429 as backpressure. During the few-second container swap of an update, agents buffer and re-send, so no agent call fails.
Two honest caveats:
- Cost telemetry is best-effort by design (it is not billing-of-record). A long collector outage can drop some rows; a fast update swap does not.
- On a single node, a container recreate is not literally zero-downtime: the ingest endpoint and dashboard are unavailable for a few seconds. For true zero-downtime you need two collector replicas behind a reverse proxy doing rolling restarts against shared Postgres (and migrations kept backward-compatible across the rollout). That is overkill for one box.
The release channel: pin to a minor, never :latest
The release workflow publishes three Docker tags per version, for example 0.10.0, 0.10, and latest. The overlay pins the collector to the minor channel :0.10:
:0.10 auto-gets bug-fix patches (0.10.1, 0.10.2, …) but never a breaking major. You move to :0.11 deliberately.:latest would auto-pull the next major and run its migrations unattended. Do not auto-track :latest in production.
The :0.10 channel exists once v0.10.0 is published. Until then, pin to the highest released minor.
Turn it on
The overlay (docker-compose.autoupdate.yml) layers on top of the collector stack. From your deploy directory:
curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mahimailabs/voicegateway/main/docker-compose.autoupdate.yml
docker compose -f docker-compose.collector.yml -f docker-compose.autoupdate.yml up -d
| Service | What it does |
|---|
collector (relabeled) | Now tracks mahimairaja/voicegateway:0.10 and carries the Watchtower-enable label. |
watchtower | Checks hourly and recreates only the labeled collector when :0.10 advances, then removes the old image. Postgres and the backup sidecar are never auto-updated. |
db-backup | A postgres:16-alpine sidecar that dumps the database on a schedule (matching server version, so pg_dump never refuses), keeping the most recent N dumps in a named volume. |
-f files together for later up, down, and logs, so Compose keeps the merged definition.
Tuning
Set these in your .env next to the Compose files:
| Variable | Default | Meaning |
|---|
VOICEGW_BACKUP_INTERVAL_SECONDS | 21600 (6h) | How often the sidecar dumps. Lower it for a fresher pre-update snapshot. |
VOICEGW_BACKUP_KEEP | 28 | How many dumps to retain (about 7 days at 6h). |
WATCHTOWER_POLL_INTERVAL (default 3600, hourly) in the overlay.
Restore from a backup
Dumps live in the voicegw-backups volume as voicegw-<timestamp>.sql. To roll back after a bad update:
# 1. Stop the collector so nothing writes during the restore.
docker compose -f docker-compose.collector.yml -f docker-compose.autoupdate.yml stop collector watchtower
# 2. List available dumps (newest first).
docker compose -f docker-compose.collector.yml -f docker-compose.autoupdate.yml \
exec db-backup sh -c 'ls -1t /backups/voicegw-*.sql'
# 3. Restore the chosen dump into Postgres.
docker compose -f docker-compose.collector.yml -f docker-compose.autoupdate.yml \
exec -T db-backup sh -c 'psql -h postgres -U voicegw -d voicegw < /backups/voicegw-<timestamp>.sql'
# 4. Pin the collector back to the known-good version, then bring it up.
# (edit the image tag in docker-compose.autoupdate.yml, e.g. :0.10.1)
docker compose -f docker-compose.collector.yml -f docker-compose.autoupdate.yml up -d
Migrations run on collector startup and are forward-only. The Compose healthcheck gates a bad boot, but the database is shared state: keep the backups (and ideally a periodic host-level snapshot of the box) so a migration regression is always recoverable.
Opting back out
Bring the stack up with only the base file to drop Watchtower and the backup sidecar and return to a manually-pinned collector:
docker compose -f docker-compose.collector.yml up -d
