---
title: Remote Updates
description: Pull the latest Sencho image and recreate the container on any node in the fleet, including the gateway, from the Fleet view.
---

Sencho can update any node in the fleet to the latest published release without ever opening an SSH session. The control instance opens the **Node updates** sheet, dispatches the update to one or more nodes, and watches each one come back online with the new version. Update availability is confirmed against a pullable Docker image on the public registry mirrors, not merely the GitHub Release timestamp, so the **Update** button does not appear until the release image has finished publishing.

This page covers the mechanism: prerequisites, what happens on a node during an update, how completion and failure are detected, and how to recover. The full UI tour for the Node updates sheet itself lives in [Fleet View](/features/fleet-view#node-updates).

<Note>
  Triggering an update (per-row or **Update all**) requires the **admin** role. Viewer and operator roles can read update status but cannot dispatch updates.
</Note>

<Note>
  This is the Sencho self-update feature, reached from the Fleet tab. The top-level **Update** nav item is a different feature: it tracks pending Docker image updates for your own stacks (Plex, Radarr, and the rest), not the Sencho binary itself. See [Health-Gated Updates](/features/health-gated-updates) for that page.
</Note>

## Prerequisites

A node can self-update when all of the following are true:

- It was deployed via **Docker Compose** with the published `saelix/sencho` image (the canonical install for both control instances and pilot agents).
- The Docker socket (`/var/run/docker.sock`) is mounted into the container so Sencho can drive Compose from inside.
- It runs a Sencho version that advertises the `self-update` capability. See [Node Compatibility](/features/node-compatibility) for the full capability list.

Nodes deployed with `docker run`, with hand-rolled systemd units, or with orchestrators like Kubernetes do not advertise `self-update`. Their **Update** button returns an error and they are skipped by **Update all**.

## Anatomy at a glance

Open the **Fleet** tab and click **Node Update** in the Overview toolbar to open the **Node updates** sheet. The sheet lists every registered node with its current and latest Sencho version, the cluster-wide summary, and the action buttons, split across two tabs: **Nodes** (the table and summary) and **Changelog** (release notes for the latest published version, pulled from GitHub Releases).

<Frame>
  <img src="/images/fleet-view/fleet-node-updates.png" alt="Node updates sheet titled 'Node updates · 4 nodes · 0 updates available'. A Recheck button sits under the header, above Nodes and Changelog tabs. Four summary cards read '4 Up to date', '0 Available', '0 Updating', '0 Failed'. A 'Filter nodes…' search box sits above a table with columns Node / Type / Current / Latest / Status; all four rows (Local, Opsix, Pitt-Moba, SLX-Mars) show a green 'Up to date' badge at v0.95.0. The footer reads 'LATEST VERSION v0.95.0'." />
</Frame>

For the per-control breakdown of the sheet (header actions, summary cards, table columns, skip/unskip, changelog tab), see [Fleet View · Node Updates](/features/fleet-view#node-updates).

## Triggering a remote update

There are two surfaces that initiate an update on a remote node:

- The **Update** button on a row inside the Node updates sheet.
- The **Update to vX.Y.Z** outline button along the bottom of any online node card on the Fleet grid.

The **Skip** button next to Update hides the update prompt for that node and excludes it from **Update all** until a newer version is released; the row shows a **Skipped vX.Y.Z** badge with an **Unskip** button to bring the prompt back early. The skip is per-node and per-version: when the next Sencho release comes out, the skip clears automatically and the update surfaces again. Skipping and unskipping both require the admin role.

<Frame>
  <img src="/images/fleet-view/node-card-opsix-online.png" alt="Node card for the Opsix remote showing an Online badge, the version chip 'v0.95.0', the Running / Stopped / Stacks counters (4 / 0 / 3), and CPU / RAM / Disk usage bars." />
</Frame>

When an update is available, this same card gains a warning **Update available** pill next to the version chip and an outline **Update to vX.Y.Z** button across the bottom (not pictured above, since every node in this fleet is currently up to date). Either surface dispatches the same backend call. While the call is in flight, the button reads **Triggering...** with a spinning icon, then settles into the **Updating** badge once the gateway has accepted the request.

The gateway switches to a fast 5-second polling loop while any node is in the `Updating` state, so the badge advances in near real time without waiting for the next 30-second fleet refresh.

## Reapply configuration

When a node is already on the current Sencho release, **Update** is hidden, but Compose-managed nodes still expose a **Reapply configuration** icon control (tooltip on hover) in the Node updates sheet. Use this after you change the node's on-disk Compose project (environment variables, mounts, ports, labels, limits, healthcheck, networks, or socket-proxy settings) and need Sencho to recreate itself from that project without selecting a newer release.

Reapply:

- Uses the same Compose project context as a version update (multiple Compose files, `env_file`, configs, secrets, and bind mounts).
- Preserves the image reference declared in Compose. Sencho does not resolve a newer release or rewrite the pin.
- Works for digest-pinned installs, because no repin step runs.
- Requires the admin role.

Confirming a local reapply opens a dialog that states the node will recreate from its current Compose configuration, the dashboard may briefly disconnect, no newer version is selected, and the configured image reference is not rewritten. Confirming a remote reapply uses the same required acknowledgement (recreate from current Compose, no newer version, no image rewrite) before the request is sent; Fleet then shows a **Reapplying** badge until the node restarts or the operation fails.

Eligible admins can also run the same procedure from the Compose editor: on Sencho's own stack the primary save action becomes **Save & Reapply**, which saves the file first, then opens the same confirmation and fleet reapply path.

## Updating the local (gateway) node

Updating the gateway is special because the dashboard is hosted by the very container that is about to restart. Clicking **Update** on the local row, or **Update to vX.Y.Z** on the Local card, opens a confirmation dialog (kicker **LOCAL · UPDATE**, title **Update local node**, with **Cancel** and **Update & restart** buttons) before anything happens on disk. The body text depends on how the compose file pins the image: for a semver pin it names the exact rewrite (for example, "This install pins `saelix/sencho:0.94.1`. Updating rewrites it to `saelix/sencho:0.95.0`..."); for a floating tag it reads more generally ("Pulls Sencho v0.95.0 and restarts the server..."). Both variants end with the same note that the dashboard briefly disconnects and reconnects automatically.

<Note>
  If the local node is running the Admiral **Hardened Build** image instead of a Community image, clicking **Update** here runs a different, entitlement-gated switch flow instead of the compose-repin steps below: it requires an authenticated browser session (not an API token) and can fail with its own codes (`entitlement_denied`, `preflight_mismatch`, `compose_unavailable`, `registry_access_unavailable`) surfaced on the same **Failed** badge. See [Licensing · Feature breakdown](/features/licensing#feature-breakdown) for what Hardened Build is.
</Note>

After **Update & restart** is confirmed on a Community-channel install:

1. The browser captures the gateway's current boot timestamp from `/api/health`.
2. The server classifies the compose image pin. For semver pins it pulls the target release, stages a rewritten compose file, and spawns a short-lived helper container that copies the file onto the host and runs `docker compose up -d --force-recreate`.
3. A full-screen **Updating Sencho...** overlay takes over the browser tab. The overlay polls `/api/health` every 3 seconds and keeps the page from reloading until a *new* boot timestamp comes back, even if the API briefly responds during the pull.
4. Once a fresh boot timestamp is reported, the overlay reloads the page on the new version.

If the pull or compose rewrite fails before the container restarts, the overlay dismisses within a few seconds and surfaces the error in a toast instead of waiting for the full reconnect timeout.

If the new container does not come up within 5 minutes, the overlay surfaces a **Taking longer than expected** message with a **Reload to check** button so the page is never left waiting indefinitely; this is not necessarily a failure, since a large image pull can legitimately run past that window. If the gateway can detect that the update did not even start (for example, the image pull failed before the helper container could spawn) it surfaces a **Failed** badge with the underlying error on the Local card. The badge appears as soon as the helper writes its error file, or by the 3-minute mark at the latest, instead of waiting for the full 5-minute timeout.

<Note>
  The self-update helper container inherits all bind mounts from the main Sencho container 1:1. If your `docker-compose.yml` references `env_file`, `configs`, or `secrets` outside the compose working directory, those host paths must be mounted into the Sencho container at the *same container path* as on the host. See [Troubleshooting](/operations/troubleshooting#local-self-update-fails-with-env-file-not-found) if you encounter `env file not found` errors during a local update.
</Note>


## Pinned image tags

Fleet self-update respects how each node compose file declares the Sencho image. Semver pins are rewritten to the target release before recreate. Floating tags such as latest are pulled without changing the compose file. Digest pins and unresolved interpolated values block automatic updates; those rows show a **Pinned** badge instead of an **Update** button.

The image pull always runs before any compose rewrite, so a failed pull never leaves the compose file half-updated.

A node running the Admiral **Hardened Build** image is a deliberate exception: it is digest-pinned like any other locked reference, but it does not show the **Pinned** badge and its **Update** button stays available, because that path routes through the Hardened Build's own entitlement-gated switch instead of a compose repin. See the note in [Updating the local (gateway) node](#updating-the-local-gateway-node) above.

## What happens during an update

For both local and remote nodes, an update goes through the same three steps:

1. **Pull** the target Sencho image from the registry (the compose-declared reference for floating tags, or the repinned semver tag for version pins).
2. **Recreate** the container with the new image via `docker compose up -d --force-recreate`.
3. **Restart** the Sencho process. The node is briefly offline during the swap.

The gateway tracks each in-flight update in memory and watches the target node for one of four completion signals, in this order of precedence:

- The remote reports a *new* `version` value over its `/api/meta` endpoint.
- The remote's process `startedAt` timestamp moves forward, indicating a fresh container start.
- The remote went offline during the watch window and has come back online, used as a fallback only for nodes that do not report a process start timestamp. A node that simply blips offline and returns on the *same* version with an unchanged start time is treated as still updating, not done, so a momentary network glitch is never mistaken for a successful update.
- More than 15 seconds have elapsed and the remote's reported version is at or above the comparison target (the gateway's own version, or the published latest, whichever is appropriate).

When any signal fires, the row flips from **Updating** to a green **Updated** badge. The **Updated** state stays visible for 60 seconds, then auto-clears so the row settles back to **Up to date**.

## Failure detection and recovery

The gateway uses two thresholds to decide when an update has failed:

| Threshold | What it means |
|-----------|---------------|
| **About 3 minutes** | If the remote is still reachable but no completion signal has fired, the gateway flips the row to **Failed**. This is the most common outcome of a registry pull error or a misconfigured Compose file: the remote answered the dispatch, started the pull, but never restarted. |
| **5 minutes** | If the remote has been unreachable and has not come back, the gateway flips the row to **Timed out**. The image was almost certainly pulled, but the new container did not stay up. |

Both **Failed** and **Timed out** badges expose two inline actions:

- A circular-arrow **Retry** button that clears the failed state and re-dispatches the update against the same node.
- An **X** **Dismiss** button that clears the failed state without retrying, returning the row to **Update available** so the operator can investigate before trying again.

Hovering either badge reveals the underlying error message reported by the remote (or by the helper container, for the gateway itself).

The header of the sheet exposes a **Recheck** button that does three things in one click: it flushes the cached "latest published version" lookup (resolved against the GitHub Releases API, with a Docker Hub fallback), it clears every terminal `Failed` and `Timed out` badge across the fleet, and it re-fetches the version metadata from every node. The published-version lookup is rate-limited to one refresh every couple of minutes, so clicking **Recheck** again right away reuses the recent result and shows a brief "checked recently" note rather than hitting the registry on every click.

<Note>
  Update tracking is held entirely in the gateway's memory. Restarting the gateway clears all in-flight, failed, and timed-out states automatically, so a stuck row always resolves itself on the next gateway restart even without a manual **Dismiss**.
</Note>

## Troubleshooting

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Local update fails with 'env file not found'">
    The self-update helper container is launched with the same bind-mount set as the main Sencho container, but only paths that are explicitly mounted are visible inside the helper. If your `docker-compose.yml` references an `env_file` (or `configs`, or `secrets`) at a host path that is *not* mounted into the Sencho container, the helper cannot read it and the recreate step fails. Mount the referenced host directory into the Sencho container at the same container path (the 1:1 rule), redeploy Sencho once, and retry the update. The full walk-through with example mounts is in [Troubleshooting](/operations/troubleshooting#local-self-update-fails-with-env-file-not-found).
  </Accordion>
  <Accordion title="The reconnecting overlay never clears">
    The overlay polls `/api/health` every 3 seconds for up to 5 minutes. If it has not cleared by then, the new container is either still pulling a very large image, refusing to start, or crashing on boot. Open a host shell on the gateway and run `docker logs <sencho-container>` to inspect the boot output, then `docker ps` to confirm a new container ID is running. The overlay's **Reload to check** button bypasses the timer once the container is healthy again.
  </Accordion>
  <Accordion title="A remote shows 'Failed' after about 3 minutes">
    The remote answered the dispatch but did not restart in time. The two most common causes are a registry pull error (rate limit, private-registry auth missing, network egress blocked) or a Compose file that fails validation under the new version. Open a shell on the remote and run `docker compose pull` followed by `docker compose up -d` against the Sencho working directory; the error printed there is the same one Sencho captured. Click **Retry** on the row once the cause is fixed.
  </Accordion>
  <Accordion title="A remote shows 'Timed out' after 5 minutes">
    The remote went offline during the swap and has not come back within the 5-minute watch window. The image almost certainly pulled (otherwise the row would have surfaced **Failed** earlier), but the new container is crashing on boot or is bound to a port that another process is now holding. Inspect `docker ps -a` on the remote for a recently exited Sencho container and `docker logs` it to see the crash. Once the remote answers `/api/health` again, click **Retry** to re-dispatch.
  </Accordion>
  <Accordion title="A node reports 'unknown' for its current version">
    The remote is reachable but its `/api/meta` response either does not include a `version` field or it cannot be parsed. The node is treated as outdated for the per-row **Update** button, so you can still trigger an update on it, but it is excluded from **Update all** because the gateway has no safe way to compare versions. After the update completes the version field comes back populated and the row joins **Update all** on the next dispatch.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>
