Run pi-hole using docker

While there are many DNS level adblockers available out there, Pi-hole clearly stands out for multiple reasons:

  1. It gives you stats and graphs of all the DNS data which is amazing
  2. It gives you a web interface using which you can selectively black list or whitelist websites and that makes things really easy.

For these reasons I prefer using pi-hole over any other DNS level adblocker. Recently I deployed pi-hole on my Server on digital ocean and it ran really well for a month but then I noticed that some hackers started using it for DNS Amplification Attack  and hence I had to shut it down. There are a lot of free DNS Servers available which provide adblocking but they are very unreliable and slow most of the times. While at home I had no issues because my raspberry pi does a great job but when I am on the move I feel the absence of it. So I wanted to find a reliable long term solution and came up with this.

Well, all thanks to this : https://hub.docker.com/r/diginc/pi-hole/ . They have made a very nice alpine based docker image for pi-hole and that makes things so simple. So essentially I can run pi-hole on my laptop itself using docker.

docker run  –name=pihole –restart=always -d diginc/pi-hole:debian
docker inspect pihole | grep IPAddress

Let’s assume you get the IP Address as 172.17.0.7

Now go to your network manager and change the default DNS Server for your wifi

screenshot-from-2017-10-05-13-31-14

screenshot-from-2017-10-05-13-31-05

That’s it, reconnect to your WIFI/Ethernet and you are done 🙂  Please remember that if you use multiple Wifi/Ethernet connections then you have to change DNS for all of them in Network Manager like we did for one Wifi above.

I also blogged about blocking adverts on your entire home network using Raspberry pi. It can be seen here:: How I use raspberry pi at my home to block advertisements on all devices and load webpages fast!

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