AdGuardHome

Network-wide ads & trackers blocking DNS server

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Quick Overview

AdGuard Home is a network-wide software for blocking ads and tracking. It operates as a DNS server that filters out unwanted content, enhancing privacy and security for all devices on your network. AdGuard Home can be installed on various platforms, including Raspberry Pi, making it a versatile solution for home network protection.

Pros

Network-wide ad and tracker blocking without the need for client-side software
Customizable filtering rules and whitelisting options
Supports various DNS protocols, including DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS
Open-source and self-hosted, giving users full control over their data

Cons

Requires some technical knowledge to set up and configure
May occasionally block legitimate content, requiring manual whitelisting
Performance can be impacted on low-powered devices when handling large networks
Regular updates and maintenance needed to keep filtering rules effective

Getting Started

To get started with AdGuard Home:

Download the appropriate binary for your system from the releases page.
Extract the archive and run the executable:

./AdGuardHome

Open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000 to access the setup wizard.
Follow the wizard to configure your network settings and DNS preferences.
Update your router's DNS settings to point to your AdGuard Home instance.

For more detailed instructions, refer to the official documentation.

Competitor Comparisons

pi-hole

48,426

A black hole for Internet advertisements

Pros of Pi-hole

Larger community and more extensive documentation
Simpler setup process, especially for Raspberry Pi users
More comprehensive web interface with detailed statistics

Cons of Pi-hole

Less flexible configuration options
Limited built-in DHCP server functionality
Fewer advanced features like DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS

Code Comparison

Pi-hole (PHP):

function gravity_collapse() {
    global $db;
    $db->query("DELETE FROM gravity WHERE date_added < (SELECT MAX(date_added) FROM gravity)");
    $db->query("VACUUM");
}

AdGuard Home (Go):

func (d *DNSFilter) Refresh() error {
    d.lock.Lock()
    defer d.lock.Unlock()
    return d.refreshFilters(false)
}

Both projects use different programming languages, with Pi-hole primarily using PHP and AdGuard Home using Go. This affects performance and maintainability. AdGuard Home's use of Go potentially offers better performance and concurrency handling, while Pi-hole's PHP codebase may be more accessible to a wider range of contributors.

dnscrypt-proxy

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dnscrypt-proxy 2 - A flexible DNS proxy, with support for encrypted DNS protocols.

Pros of dnscrypt-proxy

Lightweight and efficient, with minimal resource usage
Supports a wide range of DNS protocols, including DNSCrypt and DNS-over-HTTPS
Offers advanced features like DNS caching and query logging

Cons of dnscrypt-proxy

Less user-friendly interface compared to AdGuard Home
Limited built-in ad-blocking capabilities
Requires more manual configuration for advanced features

Code Comparison

dnscrypt-proxy configuration example:

server_names = ['cloudflare']
listen_addresses = ['127.0.0.1:53']
max_clients = 250
ipv4_servers = true
ipv6_servers = false
dnscrypt_servers = true
doh_servers = true

AdGuard Home configuration example:

bind_host: 0.0.0.0
bind_port: 53
auth_name: admin
auth_pass: password
filters:
  - enabled: true
    url: https://adguardteam.github.io/AdGuardSDNSFilter/Filters/filter.txt
    name: AdGuard DNS filter

Both projects offer DNS proxy functionality, but AdGuard Home provides a more comprehensive solution with built-in ad-blocking and a user-friendly web interface. dnscrypt-proxy, on the other hand, focuses on providing a lightweight and flexible DNS proxy with support for various encryption protocols.

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Pros of NextDNS

Cloud-based solution, eliminating the need for local hardware or setup
Offers a user-friendly web interface for easy configuration
Provides built-in analytics and reporting features

Cons of NextDNS

Requires a subscription for full features and unlimited queries
Less control over data privacy as it's a cloud service
Limited customization options compared to self-hosted solutions

Code Comparison

AdGuardHome:

- name: example.com
  rules:
    - '||example.com^$important'
    - '@@||subdomain.example.com^$important'

NextDNS:

{
  "name": "Custom List",
  "rules": [
    "||example.com^",
    "@@||subdomain.example.com^"
  ]
}

Both projects use similar syntax for blocking and allowing domains, but AdGuardHome offers more granular control with additional modifiers like $important. NextDNS uses a simpler JSON format for configuration, while AdGuardHome typically uses YAML.

AdGuardHome provides more flexibility for self-hosting and customization, making it ideal for advanced users who want full control over their DNS filtering. NextDNS, on the other hand, offers a more accessible solution for users who prefer a managed service with minimal setup requirements.

CasaOS

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Pros of CasaOS

More comprehensive home server solution with a wider range of features
User-friendly interface for managing various applications and services
Supports Docker container management out of the box

Cons of CasaOS

Less focused on network-wide ad blocking and privacy protection
May require more system resources due to its broader feature set
Potentially steeper learning curve for users primarily interested in DNS-based filtering

Code Comparison

While a direct code comparison is not particularly relevant due to the different focus areas of these projects, we can highlight some key differences in their configuration approaches:

AdGuardHome (YAML configuration):

dns:
  bind_hosts:
    - 0.0.0.0
  upstream_dns:
    - https://dns.cloudflare.com/dns-query

CasaOS (Docker Compose-like YAML):

version: "3"
services:
  app:
    image: casaos/app
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

These snippets illustrate the different focus areas: AdGuardHome on DNS configuration and CasaOS on container orchestration.

unbound

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Pros of Unbound

Highly optimized and efficient DNS resolver with low resource usage
Extensive configuration options for advanced users
Strong focus on security and DNSSEC validation

Cons of Unbound

Steeper learning curve and more complex setup compared to AdGuard Home
Lacks built-in ad-blocking and filtering capabilities
No user-friendly web interface for management

Code Comparison

AdGuard Home configuration example:

dns:
  bind_hosts:
    - 0.0.0.0
  upstream_dns:
    - 1.1.1.1
    - 8.8.8.8
filters:
  - enabled: true
    url: https://adguardteam.github.io/AdGuardSDNSFilter/Filters/filter.txt

Unbound configuration example:

server:
  interface: 0.0.0.0
  access-control: 192.168.0.0/16 allow
forward-zone:
  name: "."
  forward-addr: 1.1.1.1
  forward-addr: 8.8.8.8

AdGuard Home provides a more user-friendly configuration with built-in filtering, while Unbound offers a more granular and flexible setup for advanced users. AdGuard Home is better suited for those seeking an all-in-one solution with ad-blocking, while Unbound excels in performance and security for users who prefer a more traditional DNS resolver.

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README

AdGuard Home

Privacy protection center for you and your devices

Free and open source, powerful network-wide ads & trackers blocking DNS server.

AdGuard.com | Wiki | Reddit | Twitter | Telegram

AdGuard Home is a network-wide software for blocking ads and tracking. After you set it up, it'll cover ALL your home devices, and you don't need any client-side software for that.

It operates as a DNS server that re-routes tracking domains to a âblack holeâ, thus preventing your devices from connecting to those servers. It's based on software we use for our public AdGuard DNS servers, and both share a lot of code.

Getting Started
Comparing AdGuard Home to other solutions
How to build from source
- Prerequisites
- Building
Contributing
Projects that use AdGuard Home
Acknowledgments
Privacy

Getting Started

Automated install (Linux/Unix/MacOS/FreeBSD/OpenBSD)

To install with curl run the following command:

curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v

To install with wget run the following command:

wget --no-verbose -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v

To install with fetch run the following command:

fetch -o - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v

The script also accepts some options:

-c <channel> to use specified channel;
-r to reinstall AdGuard Home;
-u to uninstall AdGuard Home;
-v for verbose output.

Note that options -r and -u are mutually exclusive.

Alternative methods

Manual installation

Please read the Getting Started article on our Wiki to learn how to install AdGuard Home manually, and how to configure your devices to use it.

Docker

You can use our official Docker image on Docker Hub.

Snap Store

If you're running Linux, there's a secure and easy way to install AdGuard Home: get it from the Snap Store.

Guides

See our Wiki.

API

If you want to integrate with AdGuard Home, you can use our REST API. Alternatively, you can use this python client, which is used to build the AdGuard Home Hass.io Add-on.

Comparing AdGuard Home to other solutions

How is this different from public AdGuard DNS servers?

Running your own AdGuard Home server allows you to do much more than using a public DNS server. It's a completely different level. See for yourself:

Choose what exactly the server blocks and permits.
Monitor your network activity.
Add your own custom filtering rules.
Most importantly, it's your own server, and you are the only one who's in control.

How does AdGuard Home compare to Pi-Hole

At this point, AdGuard Home has a lot in common with Pi-Hole. Both block ads and trackers using the so-called âDNS sinkholingâ method and both allow customizing what's blocked.

[!NOTE] We're not going to stop here. DNS sinkholing is not a bad starting point, but this is just the beginning.

AdGuard Home provides a lot of features out-of-the-box with no need to install and configure additional software. We want it to be simple to the point when even casual users can set it up with minimal effort.

[!NOTE] Some of the listed features can be added to Pi-Hole by installing additional software or by manually using SSH terminal and reconfiguring one of the utilities Pi-Hole consists of. However, in our opinion, this cannot be legitimately counted as a Pi-Hole's feature.

Feature	AdGuard Home	Pi-Hole
Blocking ads and trackers	â	â
Customizing blocklists	â	â
Built-in DHCP server	â	â
HTTPS for the Admin interface	â	Kind of, but you'll need to manually configure lighttpd
Encrypted DNS upstream servers (DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNSCrypt)	â	â (requires additional software)
Cross-platform	â	â (not natively, only via Docker)
Running as a DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS server	â	â (requires additional software)
Blocking phishing and malware domains	â	â (requires non-default blocklists)
Parental control (blocking adult domains)	â	â (requires non-default blocklists)
Force Safe search on search engines	â	â
Per-client (device) configuration	â	â
Access settings (choose who can use AGH DNS)	â	â
Running without root privileges	â	â

How does AdGuard Home compare to traditional ad blockers

It depends.

DNS sinkholing is capable of blocking a big percentage of ads, but it lacks the flexibility and the power of traditional ad blockers. You can get a good impression about the difference between these methods by reading this article, which compares AdGuard for Android (a traditional ad blocker) to hosts-level ad blockers (which are almost identical to DNS-based blockers in their capabilities). This level of protection is enough for some users.

Additionally, using a DNS-based blocker can help to block ads, tracking and analytics requests on other types of devices, such as SmartTVs, smart speakers or other kinds of IoT devices (on which you can't install traditional ad blockers).

Known limitations

Here are some examples of what cannot be blocked by a DNS-level blocker:

YouTube, Twitch ads;
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram sponsored posts.

Essentially, any advertising that shares a domain with content cannot be blocked by a DNS-level blocker.

Is there a chance to handle this in the future? DNS will never be enough to do this. Our only option is to use a content blocking proxy like what we do in the standalone AdGuard applications. We're going to bring this feature support to AdGuard Home in the future. Unfortunately, even in this case, there still will be cases when this won't be enough or would require quite a complicated configuration.

How to build from source

Prerequisites

Run make init to prepare the development environment.

You will need this to build AdGuard Home:

Go v1.22 or later;
Node.js v18.18 or later;
npm v8 or later;

Building

Open your terminal and execute these commands:

git clone https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome
cd AdGuardHome
make

[!WARNING] The non-standard -j flag is currently not supported, so building with make -j 4 or setting your MAKEFLAGS to include, for example, -j 4 is likely to break the build. If you do have your MAKEFLAGS set to that, and you don't want to change it, you can override it by running make -j 1.

Check the Makefile to learn about other commands.

Building for a different platform

You can build AdGuard Home for any OS/ARCH that Go supports. In order to do this, specify GOOS and GOARCH environment variables as macros when running make.

For example:

env GOOS='linux' GOARCH='arm64' make

or:

make GOOS='linux' GOARCH='arm64'

Preparing releases

You'll need snapcraft to prepare a release build. Once installed, run the following command:

make build-release CHANNEL='...' VERSION='...'

See the build-release target documentation.

Docker image

Run make build-docker to build the Docker image locally (the one that we publish to DockerHub). Please note, that we're using Docker Buildx to build our official image.

You may need to prepare before using these builds:

(Linux-only) Install Qemu:

docker run --rm --privileged multiarch/qemu-user-static --reset -p yes --credential yes

Prepare the builder:

docker buildx create --name buildx-builder --driver docker-container --use

See the build-docker target documentation.

Debugging the frontend

When you need to debug the frontend without recompiling the production version every time, for example to check how your labels would look on a form, you can run the frontend build a development environment.

In a separate terminal, run:

( cd ./client/ && env NODE_ENV='development' npm run watch )

Run your AdGuardHome binary with the --local-frontend flag, which instructs AdGuard Home to ignore the built-in frontend files and use those from the ./build/ directory.
Now any changes you make in the ./client/ directory should be recompiled and become available on the web UI. Make sure that you disable the browser cache to make sure that you actually get the recompiled version.

Contributing

You are welcome to fork this repository, make your changes and submit a pull request. Please make sure you follow our code guidelines though.

Please note that we don't expect people to contribute to both UI and backend parts of the program simultaneously. Ideally, the backend part is implemented first, i.e. configuration, API, and the functionality itself. The UI part can be implemented later in a different pull request by a different person.

Test unstable versions

There are two update channels that you can use:

beta: beta versions of AdGuard Home. More or less stable versions, usually released every two weeks or more often.
edge: the newest version of AdGuard Home from the development branch. New updates are pushed to this channel daily.

There are three options how you can install an unstable version:

Snap Store: look for the beta and edge channels.
Docker Hub: look for the beta and edge tags.

Standalone builds. Use the automated installation script or look for the available builds on the Wiki.

Script to install a beta version:

curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -c beta

Script to install an edge version:

curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -c edge

Report issues

If you run into any problem or have a suggestion, head to this page and click on the âNew issueâ button. Please follow the instructions in the issue form carefully and don't forget to start by searching for duplicates.

Help with translations

If you want to help with AdGuard Home translations, please learn more about translating AdGuard products in our Knowledge Base. You can contribute to the AdGuardHome project on CrowdIn.

Other

Another way you can contribute is by looking for issues marked as help wanted, asking if the issue is up for grabs, and sending a PR fixing the bug or implementing the feature.

Projects that use AdGuard Home

Please note that these projects are not affiliated with AdGuard, but are made by third-party developers and fans.

AdGuard Home Remote: iOS app by Joost.
Python library by @frenck.
Home Assistant add-on by @frenck.
OpenWrt LUCI app by @kongfl888 (originally by @rufengsuixing).
AdGuardHome sync by @bakito.
Terminal-based, real-time traffic monitoring and statistics for your AdGuard Home instance by @Lissy93
AdGuard Home on GLInet routers by Gl-Inet.
Cloudron app by @gramakri.
Asuswrt-Merlin-AdGuardHome-Installer by @jumpsmm7 aka @SomeWhereOverTheRainBow.
Node.js library by @Andrea055.
Browser Extension by @satheshshiva.
Zabbix Template for AdGuard Home by @diasdmhub.
Chocolatey package by niks255.

Acknowledgments

This software wouldn't have been possible without:

Go and its libraries:
- gcache
- miekg's dns
- go-yaml
- service
- dnsproxy
- urlfilter
Node.js and its libraries:
- React.js
- Tabler
- And many more Node.js packages.
whotracks.me data

You might have seen that CoreDNS was mentioned here before, but we've stopped using it in AdGuard Home.

For the full list of all Node.js packages in use, please take a look at client/package.json file.

Privacy

Our main idea is that you are the one, who should be in control of your data. So it is only natural, that AdGuard Home does not collect any usage statistics, and does not use any web services unless you configure it to do so. See also the full privacy policy with every bit that could in theory be sent by AdGuard Home is available.

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