[Mashiro]

A free & self-hosted DNS sinkhole Adblocker

Many of you may already know AdGuard as a application for Android and iOS to block advertising and other bad stuff on your Android or iOS device via a local VPN or proxy on the device itself. It has a limited free version and a premium version based on subscription / licenses per device with much more features and configuration abilities. It is by far one of the best and most popular Adblockers for mobile devices.

Some of you may also have heard of a free and open source project called Pi-Hole that allows you block advertising and other stuff on DNS level by sending the request to a DNS sinkhole (0.0.0.0). Pi-Hole has become very popular as a self-hosted application for the Raspberry Pi but can also be hosted on any other normal Linux VPS. You bascially run your own local DNS server that blocks domains that are serving advertising on websites or other bad sites (spam, malware, etc.).

Now mix together AdGuard and Pi-Hole: you get AdGuard Home. AdGuard Home is (as the title says) a free, open source and self-hosted DNS sinkhole Adblocker by the makers of the AdGuard app. It can be compared to Pi-Hole as it basically uses the same concept to block advertising as Pi-Hole. However AdGuard Home comes with more features onboard that aren't available with Pi-Hole or can only be installed additionally with a lot of hassle via SSH. AdGuard Home is based on the code of the AdGuard DNS server service.

AdGuard Home Features
- Choose what exactly will the server block or not block.
- Monitor your network activity.
- Add your own custom filtering rules.
- You are the only one who's in control of your own server.
- Blocking ads and trackers.
- Built-in DHCP server.
- HTTPS for the Admin interface.
- Encrypted DNS upstream servers (DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNSCrypt).
- Cross-platform.
- Running as a DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS server.
- Blocking phishing and malware domains.
- Parental control (blocking adult domains).
- Force Safe search on search engines.
- Per-client (device) configuration.
- Access settings (choose who can use AGH DNS).
- Running without root privileges.

Text = Compared features are available with AdGuard Home but aren't available with Pi-Hole (can possibly be added by additional work, software and configuration via SSH).


Sadly DNS sinkhole based Adblockers always have a little downside:

Essentially, any advertising that shares a domain with content cannot be blocked by a DNS-level blocker.

Is there a chance to handle this in the future? DNS will never be enough to do this. Our only option is to use a content blocking proxy like what we do in the standalone AdGuard applications. We're going to bring this feature support to AdGuard Home in the future. Unfortunately, even in this case, there still will be cases when this won't be enough or would require quite complicated configuration.

Example: You cannot block advertising in Youtube videos. If you attempt to do so you will actually also block any Youtube video. No videos will play. Youtube will be broken. I tried this with Pi-Hole and it didn't work well at all. Nothing in Youtube worked.


Installation

You can easily install it on Linux or Mac with the command below:

Code: (Select All)

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh

If you prefer you can also install everything manually step by step: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHo...ng-Started

Another very easy way to deploy AdGuard Home is by Docker: https://hub.docker.com/r/adguard/adguardhome

If you use Snap (e.g. Ubuntu Server) you can install it via the Snap Store: https://snapcraft.io/adguard-home


Official AdGuard Home GitHub Repo: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

Wiki: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/wiki