V6: No way to configure additional hosts without using the UI (custom.list is gone).

[peterbraden]

Like a lot of people, I used custom.list to add additional DNS entries to pihole v5, as a way to programmatically configure DNS for my network.

But with V6 that option doesn't exist anymore.

I'm looking for a way to do this without using the UI at all.

I've tried several approaches, including mounting in the dnsmasq.d files (no longer picked up), scripting the container with the pihole command (does not have the ability to set custom DNS).

Editing the pihole.toml is undocumented, but may work?

I wondered if anyone else had a solution?

This is a: Feature Request / Regression

Details

Ideally we could simply mount a file as before, and something in pihole could sync this with the FTL data.

Related Issues

• I have searched this repository/Pi-hole forums for existing issues and pull requests that look similar

A similar issue where the user wanted to edit /etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf:
#1813

A similar issue, but requires UI:
https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/how-to-keep-separate-custom-dns-records-on-v6-via-ansible/76160/13

[yubiuser]

You can edit pihole.toml directly or use pihole-FTL --config ...

[peterbraden]

Is this a supported option? I see "# This file is managed by pihole-FTL" in the pihole.toml - I wouldn't want this to be overwritten?

Are there docs on this somewhere?

If I mount a pihole.toml into the container as read-only, will this break things?

[yubiuser]

https://docs.pi-hole.net/ftldns/configfile/

[peterbraden]

Unfortunately the documentation on the file is minimal, and doesn't answer all of my questions:

• If I mount this in as read-only, will this have any implications? It appears pihole attempts to write to this file.
• Does this file need to contain all the settings, or can just the relevant subset be included?
• It appears this file is generated by a specific release of pihole, will subsequent releases require the file to be altered?

[edgd1er]

@peterbraden , I 'v written two python scripts for my personal use, but they may be of use for you.
I use these two to have a coherent configuration accross my 4 dns servers.

phadlist is to handle clients, domains, groups and adlist list using the api. this script may have some personnal settings in it that may not suits you, but could be a good start.
loadcustom.py is ran on the dns server to changer pihole.toml file according a custom.list.

may be there is a way to also handle custom hosts. it could be an evolution of phadlist but require some investigation.

github project is here https://github.com/edgd1er/pihole_tools/

[yubiuser]

If I mount this in as read-only, will this have any implications? It appears pihole attempts to write to this file.

If you make manual changes to pihole.toml pihole-FTL watches the file and will trigger a restart of itself. Usually it re-writes the pihole.toml then to format the file, compare it to the default values and changes the 'last-changed' timestamp.
The dns.host key is special as it triggers a re-write of /etc/pihole/hosts/custom.list where the actual dnsmasq host file is.

Does this file need to contain all the settings, or can just the relevant subset be included?

It needs all the configuration. If you delete anything from the file it should rewrite the default settings on restart.

It appears this file is generated by a specific release of pihole, will subsequent releases require the file to be altered?

If we change/add config items in the file we take care that we have migration code to safely change it.

[PromoFaux]

Unfortunately the documentation on the file is minimal,

This will actually be addressed in the next FTL release - in which we did some work to the build process to not only compile the documentation, but to submit it as a pull request to our docs repo. (A preview can be seen here)