Setup Pi Hole within Docker on Raspberry Pi

This guide will walk you through the process of setting up Pi-hole, a network-wide ad blocker, within a Docker container on your Raspberry Pi.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following:

Raspberry Pi 4 with Raspbian OS installed
Docker installed on your Raspberry Pi 4
Static IP assigned to your Pi in router.

Raspberry Pi and Docker Setup:

Raspberry Pi and Micro SD

To set up my Pi Hole I used a Raspberry Pi 4 with 32 GB Micro SD.

Docker and Docker Compose 🐳

I also installed Docker on my Raspberry Pi: I didn't want to re-install everything in case something goes wrong.

Once installed, I did make sure the user pi can use it (I don't want to use sudo every time)

curl -fsSl https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.sh
sudo usermod -aG docker pi

Pi Hole Installation Steps

Start by creating a directory where you will store the configuration file for the Pi-Hole docker container.
```
sudo mkdir -p /opt/stacks/pihole
```
and use cd command to switch to the newly created directory.
```
cd /opt/stacks/pihole
```

Our next step is writing the “compose.yaml” file. This file is where we will define the Pi-Hole docker container and the options we want passed to the container.

sudo nano compose.yaml

and add following contents to it and save the file:

version: "3"
services:
    pihole:
        container_name: pihole
        image: pihole/pihole:latest
        ports:
            - "53:53/tcp"
            - "53:53/udp"
            - "67:67/udp"
            - "80:80/tcp"   # Use 8080:80/tcp if you have another service running on port 80
            - "443:443/tcp"
        dns:
            - 127.0.0.1
            - 1.1.1.1
        environment:
            TZ: 'Europe/London'     # https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
            WEBPASSWORD: "YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE"   # Replace this with your password. Pi-Hole will randomly generate the password if you don’t set a value.
        volumes:
            - './etc-pihole:/etc/pihole'
            - './etc-dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d'
        cap_add:
            - NET_ADMIN
        restart: unless-stopped

Use the following command to pull the image, create and run a docker container:
```
sudo docker compose up -d
```
Wait for the container to start. You can check the logs using the following command:
```
docker logs -f pihole
```
Or you can access the shell with:
```
sudo docker exec -it pihole bash
```
Once the container is up and running, open a web browser and navigate to http://<your_raspberry_pi_ip_address>. If you don't know the IP address of your Raspberry Pi, just run
```
hostname -I

192.168.1.162 172.17.0.1 172.29.0.1 169.254.70.85 172.21.0.1 169.254.52.242 2a00:23c7:8e8b:1201:f35:95a7:4c14:6ed
```
So, in my case, my Raspberry's IP address is 192.168.1.162. It shouldn't change until you disconnect the Raspberry from the Internet > or you restart the router.
After the setup is complete, configure your router's DNS settings to use the IP address of your Raspberry Pi as the primary DNS server.