Checking for new image updates via API in Community Edition?

[erwindouna]

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Hello!

I’m the creator of pyportainer. It’s a Python client for the Portainer API, and I’m also using it as the foundation for the Portainer integration in Home Assistant, which enables controlling and automating Portainer from within Home Assistant.

I’m currently exploring ways to programmatically detect whether containers have newer images available in Portainer Community Edition. From what I understand, Portainer itself does have the concept of an "image update indicator", where it compares the local image digest with the remote registry to determine if an update is available . In the UI you can also manually trigger a recheck of image updates for containers/services .

However, I haven’t been able to find a clear way to check this via the API. One feature I’d really like to support to be exposed via the API is to detect if containers have updates. Right now I handle this in pyportainer, by maybe a little bit over-engineered own solution in comparing the local digest, and the digest retrieved from the registry. I have made a so-called "Portainer Watcher" to enable this. This works fine, but ideally I'd like to keep Portainer as the source of thruth in this context.

Maybe I overlooked, but I was not able to find anything in the Community Edition of the API docs. Thanks for answering my question and hopefully pinpoint me in the right direction.