Blocky

Blocky is a DNS proxy and ad-blocker for the local network written in Go with following features:

Blocking - Blocking of DNS queries with external lists (Ad-block, malware) and allowlisting

• Definition of allow/denylists per client group (Kids, Smart home devices, etc.)
• Periodical reload of external allow/denylists
• Regex support
• Blocking of request domain, response CNAME (deep CNAME inspection) and response IP addresses (against IP lists)

Advanced DNS configuration - not just an ad-blocker

• Custom DNS resolution for certain domain names
• Conditional forwarding to external DNS server
• Upstream resolvers can be defined per client group Performance - Improves speed and performance in your network
• Customizable caching of DNS answers for queries -> improves DNS resolution speed and reduces amount of external
• DNS queries
• Prefetching and caching of often used queries
• Using multiple external resolver simultaneously
• Low memory footprint

Various Protocols - Supports modern DNS protocols

• DNS over UDP and TCP
• DNS over HTTPS (aka DoH)
• DNS over TLS (aka DoT)

Security and Privacy - Secure communication

• Supports modern DNS extensions: DNSSEC, eDNS, ...
• Free configurable blocking lists - no hidden filtering etc.
• Provides DoH Endpoint
• Uses random upstream resolvers from the configuration - increases your privacy through the distribution of your DNS traffic over multiple provider
• Blocky does NOT collect any user data, telemetry, statistics etc.

Integration - various integration

• Prometheus metrics
• Prepared Grafana dashboards (Prometheus and database)
• Logging of DNS queries per day / per client in CSV format or MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/Timescale database - easy to analyze
• Various REST API endpoints
• CLI tool

Simple configuration - single or multiple configuration files in YAML format

• Simple to maintain
• Simple to backup

Simple installation/configuration - blocky was designed for simple installation

• Stateless (no database, no temporary files)
• Docker image with Multi-arch support
• Single binary
• Supports x86-64 and ARM architectures -> runs fine on Raspberry PI
• Community supported Helm chart for k8s deployment