PiHole on Docker

Raspberry PI

This article is my follow-up article to Up and running with RaspberryPi with Docker. In the previous article, I showed how you can configure docker and docker-compose on your RaspberryPi.

Let’s check how to restrict external traffic from your RaspberryPi with PiHole using docker and docker-compose.

Installation

The first step to defining a place where you want to install PiHole. In my case, I am going to keep it under the ~ path.

$ cd ~
$ mkdir pihole
$ cd pihole
$ touch docker-compose.yml

Once you create the docker-compose.yml file inside the pihole directory, add the following code into it.

$ nano docker-compose.yml
version: '3'

services:
  pihole:
    container_name: pihole
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    ports:
      - '53:53/tcp'
      - '53:53/udp'
      - '67:67/udp'
      - '80:80/tcp'
    environment:
      TZ: 'America/Chicago'
      WEBPASSWORD: 'strongPassword'
    volumes:
      - './etc-pihole/:/etc/pihole/'
      - './etc-dnsmasq.d/:/etc/dnsmasq.d/'
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
    restart: unless-stopped

After saving the docker-compose.yml file, you can run the following command to bring your PiHole server up and running.

$ docker-compose up --detach

Initial run will take some time since it will download the PiHole image from docker.

After a successful run, you can check PiHole instance is running on RaspberryPi as a docker service.

# Try following commands to check PiHole service

$ docker ps
# To check the list of running containers

$ docker images
# To check PiHole image

If you have static IP defined configured in my previous article then you can access PiHole, at http://192.168.0.4/admin

Configure devices

After the installation of PiHole now we need to map other devices to use PiHole as the default gateway. For that, you can go to the network/Wifi settings of your individual devices and add 192.168.0.4 IP address to the DNS list (should be on top). See the example below:

network setup

DNS settings on MAC

Thanks for following the tutorial, happy coding!

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