Prerequisites #

1. A Raspberry Pi
2. An micro/SD card reader
3. Admin access to router

Steps #

1. Download and install the Raspberry Pi Imager
2. Insert the SD card into your computer
3. Run the imager
4. Select the OS and SD card in the Imager, and Run. I chose Raspbian Lite because I didn’t need Desktop as I would only be running webapps.
5. After the image has been written to the SD card, create a new file ssh on the boot volume: touch ssh. This allows it to start with SSH enabled, for headless setup. Additional instructions here for WiFi setup, if you can’t connect the Pi via Ethernet.
6. Connect the Pi to power and your local network.
7. Find the Pi’s IP address using a tool like Fing, your router’s DHCP page, or arp -a - look for raspberrypi.
8. SSH to the Pi: ssh pi@<IP address>. It’s a new host, so respond yes to Are you sure you want to continue connecting?. The default password is raspberry.
9. Change the password as instructed using passwd
10. Install Pi-Hole

    wget -O basic-install.sh https://install.pi-hole.net
    

11. Note down the admin console password at the end.
12. Log in to the Pi-Hole interface at <IP address>/admin and change the password.
13. Configure your DNS following these instructions. I tried to configure my router but it didn’t work so had to use the Pi-Hole as my DHCP server.
14. Refresh all the DHCP leases on your network - I did this by restarting my router.
15. Log in to the Pi-Hole Admin interface
16. Check the Settings > DHCP to verify your devices are using it as the DHCP server.
17. Check the Network to verify your devices are using it as the DNS server.
18. Enjoy network-wide ad blocking!

Troubleshooting #

I can’t access the admin interface at pi.hole #

Restarting the router worked for me.

I’m loading pages on my device but the Pi-Hole logs don’t show the queries #

Check if you have any browser extensions or locally running software that is blocking domains. I have a pretty extensive /etc/hosts file¹ that blocks lots of domains so only domains that aren’t blocked at my laptop’s network level will make it to the Pi-Hole.

Footnotes: