Easy way to bypass pihole when going to a url from browser

Feature Requests
1

I have pihole running on my homeserver and sometimes I access sites that need to be routed through an ad-server/tracker that's blocked before getting routed to the actual website (slickdeals, looking at you). Maybe add an easy way like http://?unblock= that would just route me to the site without having to go to pihole and unblock the whole house beforehand?

2

This is not possible.

Let's say you want to allow something on this URL (https://www.example.com/page)

  • If you add a query string (like ?unblock=1 ) to your URL, the browser will see:
    https://www.example.com/page?unblock=1

  • Then the browser will use Pi-hole to find out what is the IP of www.example.com.

  • Pi-hole will receive a query asking "What is the IP for www.example.com?"
    Pi-hole knows nothing about your URL.
    Pi-hole only sees the domain part. The query string is still on the browser.
    Only the domain is received and only an IP will be returned. If the domain is blocked, Pi-hole answers with 0.0.0.0.

  • Then the browser uses the IP to load the page you asked (or the domain is blocked and nothing is loaded because the browser uses 0.0.0.0).

If you want to use something like a query string to allow domains, your only option is to create a browser extension that will read/process your query string and it will force the browser to use a different DNS server (instead of Pi-hole) for that request.

3

Thanks for the quick response. The text editor here changed my message, I apologize. The example I gave should have shown http://<ip and port of pihole server>?unblock=<url I wanna go to>

So pihole creates a new /unblock endpoint to pipe you right through to the url you want without blocking anything.

Probably not the cleanest way to go but the idea is to have an easy way to go to a specific url without pihole blocking anything

4

I suppose you could always add an allow list entry for the specific sites you need unblocking. Only real side effect I can think of would be those sites would alway be unblocked, unless you were to remove the allow list entry.

This is what I have done, and if that is not enough in a specific circumstance, I just use the Pi-hole dashboard to disable/re-enable blocking based on my needs.