Software update: Pi-hole Core 5.16.1 / Web 5.19 / FTL 5.22

Version 5.16.1 from Pi-hole Core it came out. Also be Pi hole Web 5.19 and Pi hole FTL 5.22 appeared. Pi-hole is an advertising-aware DNS and web server intended to run on a Raspberry Pi in the network. If the router points to Pi-hole for DNS handling, all devices within the network will automatically use it without having to adjust any settings. Subsequently, advertisements are no longer retrieved, causing pages to load faster. It can also potentially keep malware out. For more information, we refer you to the explanation and videos on this pageor this manual from tweaker jpgview. The changelog for this release can be found below.

Highlights

A long time ago (in this galaxy…) we dropped gravity’s support for parsing Adblock Plus (ABP) style lists (v4.3.2 release notes). The parsing implementation we had in place at the time was causing far too many false positive results and the decision was taken to remove the functionality until we could come up with a better implementation. Besides which, pre-parsed and correctly formatted versions of the most popular ABP style lists have always been available via WaLLy3K’s firebog.net so there was no major disruption to users, despite what some hack articles may have led one to believe.

I don’t think we ever meant for it to take 4 years, but that better implementation has now come. To be precise, we have added support for the following domain matching syntax defined here at the time of release. No other filter rules on that page are appropriate for a DNS-based blocker, and so any entries matching them will be ignored.

These rules are intended to be wildcard blocks. So not only will they block the domain (eg ads.example.com) but they will also block subdomains (eg more.ads.example.com)

Pi hole FTL changes:

• Update embedded SQLite to 3.41.1 #1537
• Add support for Adblock Plus domain lists #1532
• Put version.ftl also behind new no-ident config option in #1539
• Add RISC-V 64-bit support and builds #1536
• Update embedded dnsmasq #1543

Full Changelog: v5.21…v5.22

Pi-hole Web changes:

• Introducing new high contrast themes #2522
• Fix successful temperature notification #2537
• Tweak teleporter output #2545

Full Changelog: v5.18.4…v5.19

Pi hole Core changes:

• Don’t use intermediate strings to filter false positives in gravity #5176
• Use buildx to create docker test images in #5178
• GitHub Workflows security hardening in #5053
• Convert domain to lowercase in pihole -q in #5200
• Allow limited parsing of ABP style adlists #5179
• Fix addKey to handle substrings of existing keys in #5211
• Allow pihole -q to match subdomains using ABP style domains in #5210
• Declaring all local variables under the function declaration line #5219
• Add configurable GRAVITY_TMPDIR variable into setupVars in #5216
• Remove systemd service and optionally override configs on uninstall in #5183
• Fix getting ‘privacy level’ in #5224

Full Changelog: v5.15.5…v5.16.1