Stuff Your Pi-Hole From Anywhere

Summary

Pi-Hole blocks advertising and tracking domains by acting as a DNS server that returns a dummy address for listed hosts, but a home deployment is difficult to use while traveling and can incur latency. The post presents “Fli-Hole,” a globally reachable Pi-Hole application deployed on Fly’s edge network, using the official Docker image without modifying Pi-Hole itself. Its configuration sets INTERFACE and DNSMASQ_LISTENING, exposes UDP port 53 through fly.toml, stores the web password as a Fly secret, and deploys with fly deploy. Additional Fly regions, such as Frankfurt, can be added so nearby traffic is routed through them. Each regional instance has independent settings and no persistence or sharing, while Dockerfile changes and redeployment provide a way to distribute configuration updates.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Pi-Hole filters advertising and tracking hosts at the DNS level by returning a dummy address instead of resolving matching domains.

2. 2

   Fly deployment requires UDP port 53 to be routed to the application’s internal port 53; Pi-Hole itself does not need to be modified.

3. 3

   Each regional Fli-Hole instance has independent settings and no persistence or sharing, so configuration changes require Dockerfile updates and redeployment.