in a WUD_WATCHER_WATCHBYDEFAULT=false scenario add containers with a regex on watcher level

[skymichel]

Setup

I am running multiple containers on the same docker host. Some of them are short living for testing and development purpose, but others are long living to serve services for my home lab. The long living ones are maintained by compose files to keep all settings in one place. The short ones a created and recreated on the fly - on CLI or VSCode or any other third party UI.
When it comes to version/update management I'm only considering the container created by compose files - the long living ones.

Current options

as of the version 9.2

1. explicitly set wud.watch=false on every on-the-fly created container. This is error-prone and no solution for the setup
2. set WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_WATCHBYDEFAULT=false on watcher level and enable only the containers in scope individually with wud.watch=true on container level. Depending on the number of containers it can be a bit of work, but feasible

Feature Request

There was a similar idea in the past #985 and the WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_EXCLUDE has been introduced. But this should be possible the other way round as well.

• start with WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_WATCHBYDEFAULT=false (empty list)
• add containers with WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_INCLUDE
• and finally remove some of the with WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_EXCLUDE
• add individual containers with wud.watch=true

But instead of just matching container names, it would be very helpful to match labels and its values as well.
Because colon (:) isn't a valid character for a container name, WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_INCLUDE can be set as "label:" to match against available container labels formatted as "<label_name>:<label_value>".
Examples:

• WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_INCLUDE=label:^com.docker.compose.* will match any container created through docker compose because of several labels starting with com.docker.compose attached to these containers
• WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_INCLUDE=label:^custom.category:toppriority1$ will match all container with a label named "custom.category" set to "toppriority1"
• WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_INCLUDE=^prod.* without leading "label:" will match the containers by name only

WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}INCLUDE should be processed before WUD_WATCHER{watcher_name}_EXCLUDE

WUD_WATCHER_{watcher_name}_EXCLUDE can adapt the new format as well, to process regex on label names and values as well.

Are there others interested in such a feature?
Should other container attributes be added?
Does this need to look different when it comes to Kubernetes?

[fmartinou]

Implemented and merged via #1348. It will be included in the next release. Thanks for the suggestion!