Setting up Pi-hole inside Docker on Raspberry Pi

Prerequisites

• Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian OS installed
• Docker installed on your Raspberry Pi 4 ( Can be installed with curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh ). You can refer this article
• Static IP assigned to your Pi in router.

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 cd to 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. 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>.
6. 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.