Pi-hole: Raspberry Pi Ad-Blocker [Advanced Setup]

Automated Install

Run this command only on a clean install of the Raspberry Pi running Raspbian.

curl -s "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jacobsalmela/pi-hole/master/automated%20install/basic-install.sh" | bash

Point your devices to use the Raspberry Pi as their DNS server and you are all set!

Advanced Setup

This guide assumes you have already set up a basic ad-blocker using the Raspberry Pi; you will basically just be replacing the gravity.sh script with the new one below.

For the advanced setup, you will be creating a script that pulls known ad servers from multiple locations, not just one that was set up in the original script.

Also check out my efforts to skip Hulu video ads

Below is the advanced gravity.sh  script, or you can view the fully-commented version on Github.  Be sure to modify the piholeIP  variable (highlighted below) to the IP address of your Raspberry Pi.  You may also want to use the commented version of the script because it contains some echo  commands so you can see how far along in the process it is.

#!/bin/bash
# The Pi-hole now blocks over 140,000 ad domains
# Address to send ads to (the RPi)
piholeIP="127.0.0.1"
# Optionally, uncomment to automatically detect the address.  Thanks Gregg
#piholeIP=$(ifconfig eth0 | awk '/inet addr/{print substr($2,6)}')

# Config file to hold URL rules
eventHorizion="/etc/dnsmasq.d/adList.conf"

echo "Getting yoyo ad list..." # Approximately 2452 domains at the time of writing
curl -s -d mimetype=plaintext -d hostformat=unixhosts http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php? | sort > /tmp/matter.txt
echo "Getting winhelp2002 ad list..." # 12985 domains
curl -s http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt | grep -v "#" | grep -v "127.0.0.1" | sed '/^$/d' | sed 's/\ /\\ /g' | awk '{print $2}' | sort >> /tmp/matter.txt
echo "Getting adaway ad list..." # 445 domains
curl -s https://adaway.org/hosts.txt | grep -v "#" | grep -v "::1" | sed '/^$/d' | sed 's/\ /\\ /g' | awk '{print $2}' | grep -v '^\\' | grep -v '\\$' | sort >> /tmp/matter.txt
echo "Getting hosts-file ad list..." # 28050 domains
curl -s http://hosts-file.net/.%5Cad_servers.txt | grep -v "#" | grep -v "::1" | sed '/^$/d' | sed 's/\ /\\ /g' | awk '{print $2}' | grep -v '^\\' | grep -v '\\$' | sort >> /tmp/matter.txt
echo "Getting malwaredomainlist ad list..." # 1352 domains
curl -s http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt | grep -v "#" | sed '/^$/d' | sed 's/\ /\\ /g' | awk '{print $3}' | grep -v '^\\' | grep -v '\\$' | sort >> /tmp/matter.txt
echo "Getting adblock.gjtech ad list..." # 696 domains
curl -s http://adblock.gjtech.net/?format=unix-hosts | grep -v "#" | sed '/^$/d' | sed 's/\ /\\ /g' | awk '{print $2}' | grep -v '^\\' | grep -v '\\$' | sort >> /tmp/matter.txt
echo "Getting someone who cares ad list..." # 10600
curl -s http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts | grep -v "#" | sed '/^$/d' | sed 's/\ /\\ /g' | grep -v '^\\' | grep -v '\\$' | awk '{print $2}' | grep -v '^\\' | grep -v '\\$' | sort >> /tmp/matter.txt
echo "Getting Mother of All Ad Blocks list..." # 102168 domains!! Thanks Kacy
curl -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0' -e http://forum.xda-developers.com/ http://adblock.mahakala.is/ | grep -v "#" | awk '{print $2}' | sort >> /tmp/matter.txt

# Sort the aggregated results and remove any duplicates
echo "Removing duplicates and formatting to address=/<ad domain>/"$piholeIP
cat /tmp/matter.txt | sed $'s/\r$//' | sort | uniq | sed '/^$/d' | awk -v "IP=$piholeIP" '{sub(/\r$/,""); print "address=/"$0"/"IP}' > /tmp/andLight.txt

# Count how many domains were added so it can be displayed to the user
numberOfAdsBlocked=$(cat /tmp/andLight.txt | wc -l | sed 's/^[ \t]*//')
echo "$numberOfAdsBlocked ad domains added to the blacklist"

# Turn the file into a dnsmasq config file
mv /tmp/andLight.txt $eventHorizion

# Restart DNS
service dnsmasq restart

The original list of ad servers from pgl.yoyo.org was about 42KB but the aggregated list from the script above is 5.5MB with around 120,000 ad domains!  That is a lot more ad servers we can now block with the Raspberry Pi!

Depending on your network connection, this could take a while to download (but this has been drastically improved).  The first time you run it, you may want to send it to the background with this command: