Setup Pi Hole within Docker on Raspberry Pi

Introduction

This guide will walk you through the process of setting up Pi-hole, a network-wide ad blocker, within a Docker container on your Raspberry Pi.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following:

• Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian OS installed
• Docker installed on your Raspberry Pi 4
• Static IP assigned to your Pi in router.

Raspberry Pi and Docker Setup:

Raspberry Pi and Micro SD

To set up my Pi Hole I used a Raspberry Pi 4 with 32 GB Micro SD. You can enable SSH during this process if you plan to access Pi without external display or enabling VNC through SSH later.

Docker and Docker Compose 🐳

I also installed Docker on my Raspberry Pi: I didn't want to re-install everything in case something goes wrong.

Once installed, I did make sure the user pi can use it (I don't want to use sudo every time)

curl -fsSl https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.sh
sudo usermod -aG docker pi

Pi Hole Installation Steps

1. Start by creating a directory where you will store the configuration file for the Pi-Hole docker container.
   

   sudo mkdir -p /opt/stacks/pihole
   

   and use cd command to switch to the newly created directory.
   

   cd /opt/stacks/pihole
   

2. Our next step is writing the “compose.yaml” file. This file is where we will define the Pi-Hole docker container and the options we want passed to the container.
   

   sudo nano compose.yaml
   

   and add following contents to it and save the file:
   

   version: "3"
   services:
       pihole:
           container_name: pihole
           image: pihole/pihole:latest
           ports:
               - "53:53/tcp"
               - "53:53/udp"
               - "67:67/udp"
               - "80:80/tcp"   # Use 8080:80/tcp if you have another service running on port 80
               - "443:443/tcp"
           dns:
               - 127.0.0.1
               - 1.1.1.1
           environment:
               TZ: 'Europe/London'     # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
               WEBPASSWORD: "YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE"   # Replace this with your password. Pi-Hole will randomly generate the password if you don’t set a value.
           volumes:
               - './etc-pihole:/etc/pihole'
               - './etc-dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d'
           cap_add:
               - NET_ADMIN
           restart: unless-stopped
   
   

3. Use the following command to pull the image, create and run a docker container:
   

   sudo docker compose up -d
   

4. Wait for the container to start. You can check the logs using the following command:
   

   docker logs -f pihole
   

   Or you can access the shell with:
   

   sudo docker exec -it pihole bash
   

5. Once the container is up and running, open a web browser and navigate to http://<your_raspberry_pi_ip_address>.
   If you don't know the IP address of your Raspberry Pi, just run
   

   hostname -I
   
   192.168.1.162 .....
   

So, in my case, my Raspberry's IP address is 192.168.1.162. If you have configured static IP for your Pi in router, this IP wont change even after you disconnect the Raspberry from the Internet or you restart the router. If you don't have static IP assigned, it might change if you disconnect the Raspberry from the Internet or you restart the router.

To access the Pi-hole admin interface, open a web browser and navigate to http://<your_raspberry_pi_ip_address>/admin.

After the setup is complete, configure your router's DNS settings to use the IP address of your Raspberry Pi as the primary DNS server.

Usage

You can now enjoy ad-free browsing on your network! Pi-hole will block ads and trackers at the network level.

To access the Pi-hole admin interface, open a web browser and navigate to http://<your_raspberry_pi_ip_address>/admin.