Skip to content

Blocky

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

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
    • Open source development
    • 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 configuration file 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

Contribution

Issues, feature suggestions and pull requests are welcome! Blocky lives on GitHub.