The unmaintained warning runs on one field — when upstream last rebuilt
the image — and off-Hub apps had no value for it. Hub answers in a single
call; the OCI API does not expose it at all, so an app on ghcr.io, quay.io
or lscr.io simply could not be assessed for staleness, which is the one
signal a user cannot work out for themselves.
It is in the image, just further down: manifest -> (if a multi-arch
index) a platform manifest -> config blob, whose "created" is the build
time. Three requests instead of Hub's one, once per registry window, and
only for the apps Hub cannot answer for — which is why Hub keeps its
cheap path rather than being routed through this.
Index and single-arch manifests are distinguished explicitly rather than
by position: in an index the first digest is a CHILD manifest, in an
image manifest it is the config itself, so reading "the first digest"
would silently fetch the wrong blob for one of the two shapes.
Live: stoat 2026-08-08, bookstack 2026-08-17, speedtest 2026-08-16,
invidious 2026-08-05 — all previously null. Hub unchanged, navidrome
still answered by the single-call path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Version discovery spoke only hub.docker.com, and every other registry
got a shrug: updaterTagExists returned "no" and updaterRegistryTags
returned nothing. Five apps live off Hub — stoat and wireguard on
ghcr.io, bookstack and speedtest on lscr.io, invidious on quay.io — and
for all of them the updater reported "up to date" having never asked.
That is the same dishonesty as a scan that never ran: an absence of
evidence rendered as a clean bill of health.
There was never a barrier, only unwritten code. The standard
Distribution API needs one extra step: request, read the
WWW-Authenticate challenge, fetch a token from the realm it names,
retry. ghcr.io, quay.io and lscr.io all answer anonymously for public
images — lscr.io by pointing its realm at ghcr.io, quay.io by not
challenging at all.
Docker Hub deliberately keeps its own path. hub.docker.com returns tags
NEWEST-first, so the 100 it pages are the 100 that matter, and it draws
on a different budget from the pull limit — registry-1.docker.io
manifest reads count against the anonymous 100/hour that the updater
needs for actual pulls, and a ladder probes a tag per rung.
Tag LISTING off Hub is a weaker signal and the comment says so: /v2/
tags/list is lexical, not newest-first, and large repos cap the page, so
the newest release can legitimately be absent. Probing backfills it,
which is why the probe fallback added earlier matters more off Hub than
on it.
Verified against all four registries: existence probing correct on eight
cases including true negatives; stoat climbs v0.15.0 -> v0.15.1 through
ghcr.io, and correctly reports nothing above v0.15.1 — the same answer
as before, but now because it looked. Hub unregressed: matrix still
resolves v1.158.0 -> v1.159.0 and nextcloud still ladders 31 -> 32 33 34.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Audit of per-app hooks/tools found 19 of 33 apps whose helpers would have
operated on the BASE app after cloning. Two general causes, both fixed by
rewriting classes rather than patching apps:
- Container references escaped the rewrite whenever a flag sat between the
docker verb and the target (`docker exec -u git gitea-service …`), since the
old rule only matched a name immediately after the verb — and the hyphenated
form missed the `<type>_` rule too. Hook trees now get the same discovered
identity rename the compose does, reading names from the TYPE's compose since
the clone has already been rewritten by then. Safe to apply broadly: the
compose pass runs first and aborts for any app whose identities aren't
<type>-prefixed, so a bare word like stoat's `api` never reaches it.
- Hooks that build the deployed path as "${containers_dir}<type>/..." instead
of "$containers_dir$app_name/..." read and WROTE the base app's files —
adguard's auth adapter edits AdGuardHome.yaml, so an instance would have
rewritten the original's config. The trailing slash is optional in the match:
dashy tests [[ -d "${containers_dir}dashy" ]] and gluetun cds into it, both
ending at the quote. Only the first path component is touched, so
${containers_dir}prometheus/prometheus/... keeps its inner segment.
Re-audit: all 33 apps with hook trees are clean. Stoat still leaks, but it is
refused at the compose stage and never reaches this code.
Volumes audited too, and need no changes: no app uses named volumes, so the
./relative bind mounts every app uses resolve inside each instance's own
deployed dir. The absolute sources that exist are host or in-container paths
correctly shared read-only (/etc/localtime, /sys, /etc/ssl/certs). Jitsi's
${CONFIG} is set per-app by its own hook to $containers_dir$app_name/... and so
follows the slug.
Bookstack's rewritten tool tree is byte-identical to the live instance's across
all 8 files, so the running instances are unaffected.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The registry helpers rejected any repo containing a dotted host segment,
which caught 'docker.io/authelia/authelia' — Docker Hub spelled out in
full. Those apps were silently skipped by tag enumeration and version
laddering. Strip the docker.io/ and index.docker.io/ prefixes before the
host check; genuinely third-party registries (ghcr.io, quay.io, lscr.io)
are still correctly skipped.
Found by auditing every app's anchor image.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Foundation for stepped upgrades. Answers one question only — WHICH
versions, in WHICH order — with no side effects, so it can be tested
exhaustively. Applying the rungs is a separate job.
Nextcloud refuses to skip a major ("Updates between multiple major
versions and downgrades are unsupported") and will not start; databases
behave the same way about their data directory. For those apps 31 -> 34
is three upgrades, each with a migration that must finish before the
next begins.
Built by PROBING each candidate rung, not by enumerating tags — because
enumeration is provably unsafe here. Docker Hub pages at 100 ordered by
recency, and the first real-registry run proved the danger: it produced
v4.2 -> v4.4 -> v4.5 -> v4.6 for mastodon, silently skipping v4.3, which
exists (HTTP 200) but had fallen off the newest-100 listing. Skipping a
rung is the precise failure this file exists to prevent, so the ladder is
now built by incrementing and probing: v4.2 -> v4.3 -> v4.4 -> v4.5 ->
v4.6, 4 steps.
Guarantees: same shape only (never 31-fpm-alpine onto 31-apache),
strictly ascending, never a downgrade, rolling tags refused outright, and
a version upstream never published is stepped over only because the probe
said so. If a continuous path to the target cannot be constructed it
returns 1 and prints nothing — refusing to guess, because a wrong ladder
means a skipped migration.
20 unit tests, including the exact listing-truncation case above and the
numeric ordering that would otherwise drive an app backwards (0.9 vs
0.10). Real registry: nextcloud 3 steps, mastodon 4, stalwart current.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
