Remote hosts

By default, watchtower is set up to monitor the local Docker daemon (the same daemon running the watchtower container itself). However, it is possible to configure watchtower to monitor a remote Docker endpoint. When starting the watchtower container you can specify a remote Docker endpoint with either the --host flag or the DOCKER_HOST environment variable:

docker run -d \
  --name watchtower \
  marrrrrrrrry/watchtower --host "tcp://10.0.1.2:2375"

or

docker run -d \
  --name watchtower \
  -e DOCKER_HOST="tcp://10.0.1.2:2375" \
  marrrrrrrrry/watchtower

Note in both of the examples above that it is unnecessary to mount /var/run/docker.sock into the watchtower container.