Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi

Motivation

In 2026, I feel we don't code a lot (I personally try to). Now it's mostly tab tab tab...... So I decided to buy a Raspberry Pi 5 and tinker with it. I started researching what things I could run on rpi5 and came across hosting my own DNS and network-level ad blocker. I was intrigued and started setting up pihole on the Pi. It's not that difficult to run it if you're coming from a technical background, but for the sake of my own knowledge and maybe building a habit of writing things down in this AI world (lol).

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi, zero also works or any device that can run Linux and connect to your home network
• Micro SD card, for the Pi
• Access to your router, mine is available at 192.168.0.1

Setup

1. Install Raspberry Pi OS, download the imager and flash it onto a micro SD card. * While installing, don't forget to enable SSH
2. Boot into the Pi and connect to WiFi or use a LAN cable to connect it to the router.
3. Assign a static IP to the Pi. It should look something like this:

Now let's install Pi-hole

Run this command on the Pi. The official guide can be found here

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

If we have already assigned a static IP, we can directly click on continue on this page:

Once the installation wizard is finished, we can visit http://192.168.0.199/admin/login or the static IP we allocated. It should ask for a password, which we can get from the terminal where we ran the installation wizard.

Voila 🚀, we now have Pi-hole running. One last thing to do is route our DNS requests to the Pi-hole instance.

Route DNS requests to Pi-hole

Go to the admin page of your router—mine is at 192.168.0.1—and find something that says DHCP Server or the place where we assigned a static IP for the Pi.

Add your Pi-hole static IP to the primary DNS for our LAN, and a secondary DNS for fallback. I've added 1.1.1.1

Done! Now all DNS requests on our local network will go through Pi-hole.

A nice video reference