[2023] PI-HOLE DNS INSTALLATION TUTORIAL - FULL WALKTHROUGH FOR BEGINNERS | NETWORK WIDE AD BLOCKER
I go over every step needed to install and configure a Pi-Hole DNS using a Raspberry Pi. Each step is done in great detail so that anyone can follow along even if you have no technological experience at all! See below for resources and more information.
Raspberry Pi 3 Kit:
https://amzn.to/3bjbHg4
SD Card:
https://amzn.to/2M7fUuF
Raspberry Pi Imager Software:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/
Pi-Hole Installation Guide:
https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
Pi-Hole Installation Command:
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
FULL STEPS:
Items needed:
Raspberry Pi 2 or higher with power cable
SD card 8GB or more
optional Keyboard
Ethernet cable
Computer with SD card port
optional Monitor with HDMI
Software:
Raspberry Pi Imager
Requisites:
Access to your router
Prepping the SD Card:
Download and install the Raspberry Pi Imager
This is needed to put the OS onto the SD card
Insert the SD card into your card reader
WARNING: ANY DATA ON YOUR SD CARD WILL BE DELETED DURING THIS INSTALLATION PROCESS. BACK UP THE DATA ON THE SD CARD BEFORE CONTINUING.
Open the Raspberry Pi Imager software.
Click on “Choose OS”
Click “Raspberry Pi OS (other)”
Select “Raspberry Pi OS Lite (32-bit)”
Next, click “Choose SD Card”
Select the SD Card you will be installing this on.
MAKE SURE YOU SELECT THE CORRECT DRIVE!
Click “Write”
Click "Yes"
NOTE: If you do not plan to access the Raspberry Pi via SSH, we are done with the SD card preparation and you can safely remove the card from your computer. If you would like to have access via SSH perform the following steps.
After the installation is done, go to the drive in your file explorer and add a file called SSH with no extension. You can do this via command line by going to the directory and using the command “touch ssh” in unix based systems. In windows, you can create a blank text document, name the file ssh, and delete the file extension by removing .txt.
Raspberry Pi Preparation:
Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi
Attach the HDMI cable to your monitor
Attach an ethernet cable and connect it to your network, ideally to your router.
Connect a keyboard to the Raspberry Pi
And now you can connect the power cable to the Raspberyr Pi.
Pi-Hole Installation:
When your Raspberry Pi boots up, it will request you to log in.
The default username and password is “pi” and “raspberry” respectively
After logging in, we will install the pi-hole application that sits on top of the OS.
Enter the following command to install Pi-Hole:
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
It will take a few minutes to download and install the application.
Pi-Hole Configuration:
After it is done installing, it will take you through the installation wizard. For the most part, we will be using the default settings.
The only decision you have to make is which external DNS to use. I personally prefer Cloudflare, but you are welcome to use any others. I would recommend OpenDNS or Google if you don’t want to use Cloudflare for whatever reason.
We also need to assign a static IP, meaning an IP address on your network that won’t change. When we get to this screen, make sure to take note of it.
Now we will finalize the installation and reboot into it.
Router Configuration:
Log into your router.
You will need to be the admin of your network or have access to the router in order to complete this part. Different brands and models have different ways of logging in so you will need to check your documentation for your specific router.
After logging in, we need to assign the static IP to the Raspberry Pi. It should be in your settings somewhere. Different routers have this setting in different places so check your documentation for assigning static IPs.
Lastly, we need to configure the DNS of the router to point to the Raspberry Pi. This is really straight forward. All you have to do is put the IP address of the Raspberry Pi into the text field for the DNS. I would recommend not to have any other DNS address here to ensure all the traffic moves through the Raspberry Pi.
And that’s it! We can now log into the Pi-Hole Dashboard to see all the traffic.
Pi-Hole Additional Steps:
I would recommend adding some regex to the block list to have a better coverage of ad blocking.
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