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 “black hole”, 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.
At this point, AdGuard Home has a lot in common with Pi-Hole. Both block ads and trackers using the so-called “DNS sinkholing” 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
✅
✅
Customizing blocklists
✅
✅
Built-in DHCP server
✅
✅
HTTPS for the Admin interface
✅
Kind of, but you'll need to manually configure lighttpd
Encrypted DNS upstream servers (DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, DNSCrypt)
✅
❌ (requires additional software)
Cross-platform
✅
❌ (not natively, only via Docker)
Running as a DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS server
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If you run into any problem or have a suggestion, head to this page and click on the “New issue” button. Please follow the instructions in the issue form carefully and don't forget to start by searching for duplicates.
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.
一个免费开源的全网络 DNS 服务器，能为家里网络中的所有设备拦截广告和跟踪器：它把跟踪域名重定向到一个“黑洞”，所以设备本身不需要安装任何客户端软件。