Developers are looking for beta testers for Pi-Hole v6 with allowlistabos and Https

The developers of ad block software Pi-Hole are starting a beta test for version 6 of the tool. This has been a long time coming, but now seems to be finally happening. Pi-Hole v6 will include allowlist subscriptions and an Https connection for the web interface.

The developers of the software are looking for beta testers. The makers say they only look for users who know what they are doing, because it is not simply possible to go back to v5. The makers do not want to venture on a definitive release date yet. They say there is still a lot of work to be done to get a stable release out.

Users of the popular ad blocking software have been waiting for Pi-Hole’s v6 announcement for a long time. Version 5.0 was released in 2020, but since then there have been mainly rumors about a future version without much being known about it.

In Pi-Hole v6, the php and lighttpd dependencies have been removed, among other things. Instead, v6 uses civetweb as a web server. According to makers, this makes the installation a lot smaller. A user-requested feature added to the tool is the ability to subscribe to other users’ allowlists. Furthermore, the various settings files are also combined into an individual file.

Another important addition is that the FTL component, intended to display real-time statistics, will now manage the Https connection itself. That is also necessary, because lighttpd did that in previous versions, but now there is native support for it. Other minor adjustments in v6 are the fact that the Docker image is now based on Alpine and therefore smaller and the page layout in the query log is now done server-side, which means that the logs should load faster on old hardware.

The makers write little about visual adjustments in the web interface. The only thing known about this for v6 is the fact that certain settings will now be divided into three different interfaces. They are called Basic, Advanced and Expert.