One Pi-hole install on a $35 board filters ads and trackers for every device on your network — phones, TVs, consoles included — with no client software at all.

Ad blockers live in your browser. Your smart TV doesn't have a browser extension store. Neither does your game console, your kid's tablet apps, or that cheap IP camera in the corner. Every one of them still phones home to ad networks and trackers — and they do it through DNS.

That's the whole pitch of Pi-hole: stop blocking ads per device and start blocking them at the layer every device on your network is forced to use. One install, on one board, filters the entire LAN. No client software, no per-device configuration, no subscriptions.

How a DNS sinkhole actually works

When your phone wants to load ads.tracker.example, it first asks the network's DNS server where that domain lives. Pi-hole sits in that chair. It checks the name against its blocklists, and if it matches, it answers: nowhere. The request dies before a single TCP connection opens. The ad never downloads, the tracker never fires, the page loads faster because half its third-party requests simply never happen.

This is why one Pi-hole protects devices that can't protect themselves. A smart TV has no uBlock Origin. A game console has no privacy settings worth trusting. But they all do DNS.

The current state of the project

Pi-hole is free and open source, and the current release line is v6 — Core 6.4.3 as of July 2026, with FTL 6.7.1 and Web 6.6 alongside it. Version 6 was the biggest rewrite in the project's history: the old lighttpd web server and PHP are gone, replaced by a web server and REST API built directly into Pi-hole itself. Configuration now lives in a single TOML file (/etc/pihole/pihole.toml), the admin interface moved to http://<pi-ip>/admin with native HTTPS support, and the interface gained Basic and Expert modes.

The hardware bar is famously low: 512 MB of RAM and 2 GB of storage. It runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Development is active, with releases as recent as this summer.

The 20-minute playbook

1. Give it a static address. Install Raspberry Pi OS Lite on your board, then pin its IP — either a static config on the Pi or a DHCP reservation on the router. Your DNS server must never wander; if its address changes, the whole network's name resolution breaks silently.

2. Run the official installer. The project ships a one-liner:

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

It's an interactive installer that asks about upstream DNS providers and blocklists. (Piping a script to bash deserves thirty seconds of your time to read what it does — the URL is short and the script is public.)

3. Point your router's DHCP at it. This is the step that makes it network-wide: in your router's DHCP settings, set the DNS server to the Pi's IP address. Every device that joins the network picks it up automatically. No per-device setup, no app installs.

4. Tune the blocklists, gently. The default list is conservative on purpose. You can add more, but every list you add is somebody else's judgment about what the web should look like. Add one at a time, live with it for a day, and watch the query log before adding the next.

The honest limitations

A DNS sinkhole is powerful but not magic, and the operator's job is knowing where the magic stops:

  • YouTube and in-app ads mostly survive. When ads are served from the same domains as the content itself, DNS can't separate them. Pi-hole kills tracker and ad-network domains; it won't split an ad out of a video stream.
  • Some devices cheat on DNS. Chromecasts and certain phones ship with hardcoded DNS (usually 8.8.8.8) and bypass your Pi-hole entirely. The fix is a firewall rule on your router blocking outbound port 53 except from the Pi — but that's a second project.
  • Stale guides will waste your evening. A huge number of tutorials still tell you to bolt on Cloudflare's cloudflared for DNS-over-HTTPS. Cloudflare deprecated that feature in late 2025 and removed it from new releases in February 2026. Follow the current Pi-hole documentation, not a 2023 blog post.
  • If the Pi dies, the "internet" dies. A dead Pi-hole means no DNS for the whole house, which every non-technical person in it will report as the internet being down. Keep the old DNS settings written down somewhere, consider a UPS, and don't host it on the same SD card you're already worried about.

The bottom line

One small board, one evening, and every device on your network — including the ones with no extension store — stops talking to ad networks. It's the highest-leverage home-lab project per dollar that exists: roughly $35 of hardware doing the work of a dozen browser extensions you'll never have to install.

Sources: Pi-hole official documentation (pi-hole.net), raspberry.tips Pi-hole setup guide (Sept 2026 — Core 6.4.3 / FTL 6.7.1 / Web 6.6), WunderTech AdGuard Home vs Pi-hole comparison (v6 rewrite details, cloudflared DoH deprecation), Medium guide on Pi-hole v6 breaking changes.