Feature request: notify out-of-date version

[m13253]

0. Feature request

Hello Caddy dev,

Although we have discussed (#576) that we currently can't find a suitable method to auto upgrade Caddy, since Caddy now has a telemetry system, can we implement an out-of-date notification (so the administrator can upgrade Caddy manually)?

We might need to repeat the notification every X minutes or when every Y lines of logs are print to avoid being ignored.

Thanks.

[brink668]

I would like this as well.

[mholt]

This is a good idea. The Caddy version is reported in telemetry already. I guess we just need to show it on the stats page for your instance, then you can set up an alert to monitor for that. How does that sound?

(Actually, if you look at the network tab, it should already return the version information in JSON -- it's just not rendered on the page yet. I'm trying to remember from the top of my head so I'm not positive but give it a look.)

[theel0ja]

PowerDNS checks updates anonymously via DNS, see: https://doc.powerdns.com/authoritative/security.html#security-polling

[francislavoie]

Oooh, that's clever @theel0ja, thanks for pointing that out!

[francislavoie]

@mholt is this something you'd be willing to implement?

We could do this as part of our release CI job with a little Go program that uses whatever libdns plugin necessary for the caddyserver.com domain, it could write a TXT record with the current version number.

[mholt]

Mmm, lemme think about it. It's definitely weird...

[francislavoie]

I think this is unlikely to happen any time soon. I'll close this as stale for now. We might come back to this later.