thexperiments / ansible-pihole

A minimalistic playbook to set up Pi-hole on a debian system with a keepalived high availability configuration

Ansible playbook for Pi-hole on debian

A minimalistic playbook to set up Pi-hole on a debian system (lxc containers in my case) together with a keepalived high availability configuration.

You can also use this with a single machine if you disable keepalived in the group_vars but iis strongly recommended to set up such an important service with high availability.

Prerequisites

Two (or more) debian based machines with working ssh login.

(for now only tested with root in ubuntu 20.04 lxc containers but should work with others too)

Setup

1. Install Ansible
   • For debian sudo apt-get install -y python3-pip and pip3 install ansible should do the job
2. Get the files which are in this repository if you don't already have them
   • git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thexperiments/ansible-pihole.git

Configuration

1. Update all IP addresses for the host in the inventory located in host_vars
2. Update all more general settings for all hosts in the group in the file group_vars/piholes.yml
   • change IP addresses
     • make sure keepalived_virtual_ip is a IP not used by anything else and not in DHCP range. This will be the address you later use the Pi-hole with.
   • change passwords from the examples to secure passwords
   • check all settings
3. Check the template for the Pi-hole settings templates/setupVars.conf.j2 if there are settings of interest configured which I have not set with variables

Rollout

Just run

ansible-playbook main.yml

It should connect to the two machines configured earlier, install Pi-hole on both, set up the one called pihole as master in keepalived. You now have two instances reachable on their own IPs and the high available one via the virtual IP configured with keepalived_virtual_ip.

Remarks

Syncing

I did explicitly choose to not setup any syncing between the instances for several reasons

• complexity
• robustness
• I don't do manual changes to my Pi-hole often

Instead I configured the blocklists and the local hostnames and exported a backup via Teleporter in the web UI and imported it on the second instance.

Updates

The task for installing can be repeated without problems (currently, not officially supported by the installer) so running the task again will automatically update Pi-hole. Settings should stay except the ones defined in this playbook.

High availability setup

The current keepalived setup is very rudimentary it will switch over if the connection to the other host breaks. It does not check if Pi-hole is still answering DNS requests. (Would be a nice addition, feel free to contribute)