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Vessl Docs

Maintenance & Updates

Vessl includes built-in tools to monitor server health, automatically clean up unused resources, and update itself without any manual intervention.

System Maintenance

Section titled “System Maintenance”

Vessl proactively tracks disk and resource usage to prevent your server from running out of space.

What Vessl Measures

Section titled “What Vessl Measures”
  • Root filesystem disk usage.
  • Docker storage and reclaimable data.
  • Build artifact and cache size.
  • Database backup storage size.

Automated Cleanup (Garbage Collection)

Section titled “Automated Cleanup (Garbage Collection)”

You can configure Vessl to run a background cleanup task via the Docker Cleanup Cron setting in the dashboard. This task safely removes:

  • Stopped, orphaned Docker containers.
  • Unused, dangling Docker images.
  • Unused Docker build caches.
  • Old Vessl build artifacts.

Vessl explicitly avoids pruning Docker volumes automatically, ensuring your database data is never accidentally deleted even if a container is temporarily stopped.

Disk Usage Alerts

Section titled “Disk Usage Alerts”

Configure the Disk Usage Threshold (e.g., 80%) and a cron schedule for checks. If your server crosses this threshold, Vessl will alert you via your configured notification channels (Discord, Slack, Email) so you can intervene before a catastrophic disk-full error occurs.

System Updates

Section titled “System Updates”

Vessl can keep itself updated to the latest version automatically.

Auto-Updates

Section titled “Auto-Updates”

Because Vessl runs as a set of Docker containers (vessld, vessl-ui, traefik), updates are incredibly clean.

When Auto Update Enabled is turned on in System Settings, Vessl will:

  1. Check for a new release based on the Update Check Cron schedule.
  2. If a new version is detected, pull the latest Docker images.
  3. Gracefully restart the vessld container.

Your running applications and databases will not go offline during a Vessl update. Only the dashboard and control plane API will be momentarily unavailable while the container restarts.

Manual Updates

Section titled “Manual Updates”

If you prefer to update Vessl manually, you can turn off Auto Updates. When a new version is available, it will be highlighted in the dashboard.

You can trigger a manual update via the UI, or by running the following on your server:

Terminal window
vessld update