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AdGuard Home

Privacy protection center for you and your devices

Free and open source, powerful network-wide ads & trackers blocking DNS server.

AdGuard.com | Wiki | Reddit | Twitter | Telegram

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AdGuard Home is a network-wide software for blocking ads & 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 -- both share a lot of common code.

Getting Started

Please read the Getting Started article on our Wiki to learn how to install AdGuard Home, and how to configure your devices to use it.

If you're running Linux, there's a secure and easy way to install AdGuard Home - you can get it from the Snap Store.

Alternatively, you can use our official Docker image.

Guides

API

If you want to integrate with AdGuard Home, you can use our REST API. Alternatively, you can use this python client, which is used to build the AdGuard Home Hass.io Add-on.

Comparing AdGuard Home to other solutions

How is this different from public AdGuard DNS servers?

Running your own AdGuard Home server allows you to do much more than using a public DNS server. It's a completely different level. See for yourself:

  • Choose what exactly will the server block or not block.
  • Monitor your network activity.
  • Add your own custom filtering rules.
  • Most importantly, this is your own server, and you are the only one who's in control.

How does AdGuard Home compare to Pi-Hole

At this point, AdGuard Home has a lot in common with Pi-Hole. Both block ads and trackers using "DNS sinkholing" method, and both allow customizing what's blocked.

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.

Disclaimer: 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 lighthttpd
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 ✅ ❌ (requires additional software)
Blocking phishing and malware domains ✅ ❌ (requires non-default blocklists)
Parental control (blocking adult domains) ✅ ❌
Force Safe search on search engines ✅ ❌
Per-client (device) configuration ✅ ✅
Access settings (choose who can use AGH DNS) ✅ ❌

How does AdGuard Home compare to traditional ad blockers

It depends.

"DNS sinkholing" is capable of blocking a big percentage of ads, but it lacks flexibility and power of traditional ad blockers. You can get a good impression about the difference between these methods by reading this article. It compares AdGuard for Android (a traditional ad blocker) to hosts-level ad blockers (which are almost identical to DNS-based blockers in their capabilities).

However, 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 tradtional ad blockers).

Known limitations

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 complicated configuration.

How to build from source

Prerequisites

You will need this to build AdGuard Home:

Building

Open Terminal and execute these commands:

git clone https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome
cd AdGuardHome
make

Check the Makefile to learn about other commands.

Preparing release

You'll need this to prepare a release build:

Run make snapshot or make release to build all AdGuard distrs.

Docker image

  • Run make docker to build the Docker image locally.
  • Run make docker-multi-arch to build the multi-arch Docker image (the one that we publish to Docker Hub).

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
  • Prepare builder: docker buildx create --name buildx-builder --driver docker-container --use

Resources that we update periodically

  • scripts/translations
  • scripts/whotracksme

Contributing

You are welcome to fork this repository, make your changes and submit a pull request — https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/pulls

Test unstable versions

There are three options how you can install an unstable version.

  1. You can either install a beta version of AdGuard Home which we update periodically.
  2. You can use the Docker image from the edge tag, which is synced with the repo master branch.
  3. You can install AdGuard Home from beta or edge channels on the Snap Store.

Report issues

If you run into any problem or have a suggestion, head to this page and click on the New issue button.

Help with translations

If you want to help with AdGuard Home translations, please learn more about translating AdGuard products here: https://kb.adguard.com/en/general/adguard-translations

Here is a link to AdGuard Home project: https://crowdin.com/project/adguard-applications/en#/adguard-home

Other

Here's what you can also do to contribute:

  1. Look for issues marked as "help wanted".
  2. Actualize the list of Blocked services. It it can be found in dnsfilter/blocked_services.go.
  3. Actualize the list of known trackers. It it can be found in client/src/helpers/trackers/adguard.json.
  4. Actualize the list of vetted blocklists. It it can be found in client/src/helpers/filters/filters.json.

Projects that use AdGuardHome

Acknowledgments

This software wouldn't have been possible without:

You might have seen that CoreDNS was mentioned here before — we've stopped using it in AdGuardHome. While we still use it on our servers for AdGuard DNS service, it seemed like an overkill for Home as it impeded with Home features that we plan to implement.

For a full list of all node.js packages in use, please take a look at client/package.json file.