If you're looking for a way to quickly and easily get up and running with a Pi-hole device for your home network, this is the project for you.
This project is a balenaCloud stack with the following services:
balenaCloud is a free service to remotely manage and update your Raspberry Pi through an online dashboard interface, as well as providing remote access to the Pi-hole web interface without any additional configuation.
- Raspberry Pi 2/3/4 (Note: this project will not work with the Pi Zero), balenaFin, or NanoPi Neo Air
- 16GB Micro-SD Card (we recommend Sandisk Extreme Pro SD cards)
- Display (any Raspberry Pi display will work for this project)
- Micro-USB cable
- Power supply
- Case (optional)
You can one-click-deploy this project to balena using the button below:
Alternatively, deployment can be carried out by manually creating a balenaCloud account and application, flashing a device, downloading the project and pushing it via either Git or the balena CLI.
Device Variables apply to all services within the application, and can be applied fleet-wide to apply to multiple devices. If you used the one-click-deploy method, the default environment variables will already be added for you to customize as needed.
| Name | Example | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
TZ |
America/Toronto |
To inform services of the timezone in your location, in order to set times and dates within the applications correctly. Find a list of all timezone values here. |
DNSMASQ_LISTENING |
eth0 |
We set this to eth0 to indicate we want DNSMASQ to listen on the ethernet interface of the Raspberry Pi. If you're connecting to your network with WiFi replace this with wlan0 |
INTERFACE |
eth0 |
As above. |
WEBPASSWORD |
mysecretpassword |
(optional) password for accessing the web-based interface of Pi-hole - you won’t be able to access the admin panel without defining a password here. |
DNS1 |
127.0.0.1#5053 |
(optional) Tell Pi-hole where to forward DNS requests that aren’t blocked. We’re using the Unbound project here but you can specify your own. |
DNS2 |
127.0.0.1#5053 |
(optional) Secondary DNS server - see above. |
ServerIP |
x.x.x.x |
(recommended) Set to your server's LAN IP, used by web block modes and lighttpd bind address. |
Check out our blog post on how to deploy network-wide ad-blocking with Pi-hole:
https://www.balena.io/blog/deploy-network-wide-ad-blocking-with-pi-hole-and-a-raspberry-pi/
Connect to the Pi-hole admin interface at http://device-ip/admin or enable
the Public Device URL in the dashboard and append /admin to device URL.
Note that balena-pihole uses the fbcp block.
The PiTFT LCD screens from Adafruit (and others) are supported.
In order to use these displays you're required to add additional configuration by setting
the FBCP_DISPLAY variable within the dashboard. This variable should be set to one of the values below:
adafruit-hx8357d-pitftadafruit-ili9341-pitftfreeplaytech-waveshare32bwaveshare35b-ili9486tontec-mz61581waveshare-st7789vw-hatwaveshare-st7735s-hatkedei-v63-mpi3501
If your display is not listed above, please check if the fbcp-ili9341
driver that fbcp block uses supports it.
PRs are welcomed to add support for further displays in the fbcp block.
If you had previously enabled your screen via BALENA_HOST_CONFIG_dtoverlay
in your device config you will need to remove/disable that setting.
If your screen doesn't work with any of the new FBCP_DISPLAY display options, the old
display block using DT overlays is still available in the fpi-fbcp branch!
The following Device Configuration variables might be required for proper scaling and resolutions:
| Name | Value |
|---|---|
| BALENA_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_cvt | 480 320 60 1 0 0 0 |
| BALENA_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_force_hotplug | 1 |
| BALENA_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_group | 2 |
| BALENA_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_mode | 87 |
| BALENA_HOST_CONFIG_rotate_screen | 1 |
The included config should work for Unbound and was taken mostly from this guide:
https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/unbound/
If you're having trouble getting the project running, submit an issue or post on the forums at https://forums.balena.io.
Please open an issue or submit a pull request with any features, fixes, or changes.