After a successful beta testing period, Pi-hole has released version 5.0! Pi-hole is our favorite DNS level ad-blocker that helps block advertisements, trackers, and even malware from your entire network. The release of Pi-hole 5.0 has been anticipated since the beta program began back in January.
New Features
It includes some of the most requested features, such as Per-client blocking and client grouping and local DNS records. In addition, they have switched from storing data in files to a new gravity database to improve performance. Some of the awesome new features that were included in Pi-hole 5.0 are outlined below.
Per-Client Blocking
Pi-hole 5.0 features per-client blocking! This is one of the most requested features. Per-client blocking means that you can blacklist and whitelist websites for each individual client on your network. This means that if you have Netflix set to be blocked on your entire network, you can unblock it for one or two individual devices.
Client Groups
In addition to per-client blocking you can also organize your network machines into individual grouping and apply blacklisted or whitelisted websites to an entire group of machines. For example, you could have your kids electronics in one group, your IOT devices in another group.
Local DNS Records
If you have machines in your home that are hosting different applications you can now add custom DNS records that will point a custom domain to an IP address on your network. For example, you can set it to point nas
in your browser to the IP address of your network attached storage device.
How to Upgrade?
If you already have Pi-hole installed you can update to the new version by opening up the terminal and running the following command:
pihole -up
If you have been beta testing the 5.0 beta release, run the following command to move from the beta to the master branch.
pihole checkout master
If you have Pi-hole installed in a Docker container, you can use Watchtower to update your container while preserving all of your environment variables.
If you don’t have Pi-hole installed but want to give it a try, it is very easy to run Pi-hole in a Docker container. You can also use their one command install method by running the following command:
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
If you have any questions or suggestions relating to Pi-hole, please leave them in the comments below.
The post, “Pi-hole 5.0 is Out Now!” first appeared on Codeopolis.