notes/Deploying pihole-docker to a brand new Debian instance.md

#documentation #homelab Official docs can be found on the github page and the home page

Preperation

• The system was entirely updated with sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade.
• docker and docker-compose were installed via apt
• It was noted that docker.service was not running, with an error similar to

Error starting daemon: Error initializing network controller: error obtaining controller instance: failed to create NAT chain DOCKER: iptables failed: iptables -t nat -N DOCKER: iptables v1.8.2 (nf_tables): CHAIN_ADD failed

• This was resolved by running the commands below as detailed here

sudo update-alternatives --set iptables /usr/sbin/iptables-legacy  
sudo update-alternatives --set ip6tables /usr/sbin/ip6tables-legacy

Deployment

• A docker-compose.yml file was created with the contents:

version: "3"

# More info at https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole/ and https://docs.pi-hole.net/
services:
  pihole:
  # start on boot and when crashed
	restart: unless-stopped
    container_name: pihole
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    # For DHCP it is recommended to remove these ports and instead add: network_mode: "host"
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "67:67/udp" # Only required if you are using Pi-hole as your DHCP server
      - "80:80/tcp"
    environment:
      TZ: 'America/Chicago'
      # set the web dashboard to have no passwd
      WEBPASSWORD: ''
    # Volumes store your data between container upgrades
    volumes:
      - './etc-pihole:/etc/pihole'
      - './etc-dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d'
    #   https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole#note-on-capabilities
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN # Required if you are using Pi-hole as your DHCP server, else not needed
    restart: unless-stopped

The time zone was updated to the correct timezone, a configuration option added to make the container start automatically, and the docker container started with (Note: If you are not using a docker user, you will need to add your user to the docker group. This can be done with sudo usermod -aG docker [user]):

docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml up -d

You can check the status of all docker containers with docker ps, and get detailed logs for the pihole container with docker logs pihole Test and see if the pihole is running by changing a system's DNS server to the pihole's IP, then going to http://[ip]/admin/ or http://pi.hole

Troubleshooting

• Restart the server:

sudo reboot -h now

• Check if the container is running:

docker ps

• Check the logs:

docker logs pihole

• See if the container is listening(grep can be omitted to check all services):

sudo ss -tulpn | grep 53