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Pi-hole®: The multi-platform, network-wide ad blocker

Block ads for all your devices without the need to install client-side software.

Executive Summary

The Pi-hole blocks ads at the DNS-level, so all your devices are protected.

  • Easy-to-install - our intelligent installer walks you through the process with no additional software needed on client devices
  • Universal - ads are blocked in non-browser locations such as ad-supported mobile apps and smart TVs
  • Quick - installation takes less than ten minutes and it really is that easy
  • Informative - an administrative Web interface shows ad-blocking statistics
  • Lightweight - designed to run on minimal resources
  • Scalable - even in large environments, Pi-hole can handle hundreds of millions of queries (with the right hardware specs)
  • Powerful - advertisements are blocked over IPv4 and IPv6
  • Fast - it speeds up high-cost, high-latency networks by caching DNS queries and saves bandwidth by not downloading advertisement elements
  • Versatile - Pi-hole can function also function as a DHCP server

One-Step Automated Install

  1. Install a supported operating system
  2. Run the command below (it downloads this script in case you want to read over it first!)

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

Alternative Semi-Automated Install Methods

If you wish to read over the script before running it, run nano basic-install.sh to open the file in a text viewer.

Clone our repository and run the automated installer from your device.

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole.git Pi-hole
cd Pi-hole/automated\ install/
bash basic-install.sh
Or
wget -O basic-install.sh https://install.pi-hole.net
bash basic-install.sh

Once installed, configure your router to have DHCP clients use the Pi-hole as their DNS server and then any device that connects to your network will have ads blocked without any further configuration.

If your router does not support setting the DNS server, you can use Pi-hole's built in DHCP server; just be sure to disable DHCP on your router first.

Alternatively, you can manually set each device to use Pi-hole as their DNS server.

What is Pi-hole and how do I install it?

Pi-hole Is Free, But Powered By Your Donations

Digital Ocean helps with our infrastructure, but our developers are all volunteers so your donations help keep us innovating.

Other Ways To Support Us

Affiliate Links

If you'd rather not send money, there are other ways to support us: you can sign up for services through our affiliate links, which will also help us offset some of the costs associated with keeping Pi-hole operational; or you can support us in some non-tangible ways as listed below.

Contributing Code Via Pull Requests

We don't work on Pi-hole for monetary reasons; we work on it because we think it's fun and we think our software is important in today's world. To that end, we welcome all contributors--from novices to masters.

If you feel you have some code to contribute, we're happy to take a look. Just make sure to fill out our template when submitting a pull request. We're all volunteers on the project and without all the information in the template, it's very difficult for us to quickly get the code merged in.

You'll find that the install script and the debug script have an abundance of comments. These are two important scripts but we think they can also be a valuable resource to those who want to learn how to write scripts or code a program, which is why they are fully commented. So we encourage anyone who likes to tinker to read through it and submit a PR for us to review.

Presenting About Pi-hole

Word-of-mouth has immensely helped our project grow. If you are going to be presenting about Pi-hole at a conference, meetup, or even for a school project, get a hold of us for some free swag to hand out to your audience.

Overview Of Features

The Dashboard (Web Interface)

The dashboard will (by default) be enabled during installation so you can view stats, change settings, and configure your Pi-hole.

Pi-hole Dashboard

There are several ways to access the dashboard:

  1. http://<IP_ADDPRESS_OF_YOUR_PI_HOLE>/admin/
  2. http:/pi.hole/admin/ (when using Pi-hole as your DNS server)
  3. http://pi.hole/ (when using Pi-hole as your DNS server)

The Query Log

If enabled, the query log will show all of the DNS queries requested by clients using Pi-hole as their DNS server. Forwarded domains will show in green, and blocked (Pi-holed) domains will show in red. You can also white or black list domains from within this section.

The query log and graphs are what have helped people discover what sort of traffic is traversing their networks.

Long-term Statistics

Using our Faster-Than-Light Engine (FTL), Pi-hole can store all of the domains queried in a database for retrieval or analysis later on. You can view this data as a graph, individual queries, or top clients/advertisers.

Whitelist And Blacklist

Domains can be whitelisted and/or blacklisted using either the dashboard or the pihole command.

Additional Blocklists

By default, Pi-hole blocks over 100,000 known ad-serving domains. You can expand the blocking power of your Pi-hole by adding additional lists such as the ones found on The Big Blocklist Collection.

Enable And Disable Pi-hole

Sometimes you may want to stop using Pi-hole or turn it back on. You can trigger this via the dashboard or command line.

Tools

Update Ad Lists

This runs gravity to download any newly-added domains from your source lists.

Query Ad Lists

You can find out what list a certain domain was on. This is useful for troubleshooting sites that may not work properly due to a blocked domain.

tailing Log Files

You can watch the log files in real time to help debug any issues, or just see what's happening with your Pi-hole.

Pi-hole Debugger

If you are having trouble with your Pi-hole, this is the place to go. You can run the debugger and it will attempt to diagnose any issues and then link to an FAQ with instructions on rectifying the problem.

If run via the command line, you will see red/yellow/green text, which makes it easy to identify any problems.

After the debugger has finished, you have the option to upload it to our secure server for 48 hours. All you need to do then is provide one of our developers the unique token generated by the debugger (this is usually done via our forums).

However, most of the time, you will be able to solve any issues without any intervention from us. But if you can't, we're always around to help out.

Settings

The settings page lets you control and configure your Pi-hole. You can do things like:

  • view networking information
  • flush logs or disable the logging of queries
  • enable Pi-hole's built-in DHCP server
  • manage block lists
  • exclude domains from the graphs and enable privacy options
  • configure upstream DNS servers
  • restart Pi-hole's services
  • back up some of Pi-hole's important files
  • and more!

Built-in DHCP Server

Pi-hole ships with a built-in DHCP server. This allows you to let your network devices use Pi-hole as their DNS server if your router does not let you adjust the DHCP options.

One nice feature of using Pi-hole's DHCP server if you can set hostnames and DHCP reservations so you'll see hostnames in the query log instead of IP addresses. You can still do this without using Pi-hole's DHCP server; it just takes a little more work. If you do plan to use Pi-hole's DHCP server, be sure to disable DHCP on your router first.

The FTL Engine: Our API

A read-only API can be accessed at admin/api.php (the same output can be achieved on the CLI by running pihole -c -j).

It returns the following JSON:

{
   "domains_being_blocked":111175,
   "dns_queries_today":15669,
   "ads_blocked_today":1752,
   "ads_percentage_today":11.181314,
   "unique_domains":1178,
   "queries_forwarded":9177,
   "queries_cached":4740,
   "unique_clients":18
 }

More details on the API can be found here and on the repo itself.

Real-time Statistics, Courtesy Of The Time Cops

Using chronometer2, you can view real-time stats via ssh or on an LCD screen such as the 2.8" LCD screen from Adafruit.

Simply run pihole -c for some detailed information.

|¯¯¯(¯)__|¯|_  ___|¯|___        Pi-hole: v3.2
| ¯_/¯|__| ' \/ _ \ / -_)      AdminLTE: v3.2
|_| |_|  |_||_\___/_\___|           FTL: v2.10
 ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
  Hostname: pihole              (Raspberry Pi 1, Model B)
    Uptime: 11 days, 12:55:01
 Task Load: 0.35 0.16 0.15      (Active: 5 of 33 tasks)
 CPU usage: 48%                 (1 core @ 700 MHz, 47c)
 RAM usage: 12%                 (Used: 54 MB of 434 MB)
 HDD usage: 20%                 (Used: 1 GB of 7 GB)
  LAN addr: 192.168.1.100       (Gateway: 192.168.1.1)
   Pi-hole: Active              (Blocking: 111175 sites)
 Ads Today: 11%                 (1759 of 15812 queries)
   Fwd DNS: 208.67.222.222      (Alt DNS: 3 others)
 ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
 Recently blocked: www.google-analytics.com
   Top Advertiser: www.example.org
       Top Domain: www.example.org
       Top Client: somehost

Get Help Or Connect With Us On The Web

Technical Details

To summarize into a short sentence, the Pi-hole is an advertising-aware DNS/Web server. And while quite outdated at this point, this original blog post about Pi-hole goes into great detail about how it was setup and how it works. Syntactically, it's no longer accurate, but the same basic principles and logic still apply to Pi-hole's current state.

Pi-hole Projects

Coverage