External links entry in the pihole menu

It would be useful for a lot of people to have an "external links" entry in the pihole menu. The external links category could (should) be accessible without having to login.

examples of external links:

  • webmin, described here, section 4.11
  • sql browser, described here
  • pihole on discourse, link here
  • pihole documentation, link here
  • pihole on reddit, link here
  • tail, a new and promising app, live feed here

    The external links should be configurable, using a new configuration file, allowing users to add entries as they please

Why not just use browser bookmarks?

Because I don't want to duplicate all of the links in every browser I'm using. Because the links are for use with pihole. Because I don't want to make all of these links over and over again on all of the pc's I use. Because I can make these links available on any computer and pihole implementation everywhere I go, by simply copying a single configuration file. And so many more reasons …

this really isn't within the scope of Pi-hole in my personal opinion.

Pi-hole is a DNS server not an all in one. the devs have plenty to worry about that relates to the core code when something like this is something a user should implement in other ways for themselves.

The devs themselves will reply with whether they think it is out of scope but i don't see it making t in

should you wish to customize your Pi-hole there are plenty of options here

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I'm in agreement.

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I don't think the devs will have the time to customize Pi-Hole for this (for them to decide). Why not just make one set of bookmarks and share them among all your browsers and PC's? Put the bookmarks on a server and all the browsers use the same bookmarks (Dropbox for example). I have a bookmark folder just for Pi-Hole items.

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It's really hard to add some functionality. 30 minutes work, without ever looking at the code before:

Unfortunately, as with everything in pihole, it's overwritten after pihole -r or pihole -up
Thus the feature request...

I see a few problems with this approach:

  1. It's expanding the scope of Pi-Hole beyond a domain blocker to a "one stop shop for all your needs" by including user bookmarks in the web interface, instead of using the bookmarks feature that exists in all browsers already.
  2. Not all users enable the web interface.
  3. Users running multiple Pi-Holes would have to modify all the installs (via configuration file or whatever method) to get the links consistent, as opposed to changing one set of bookmarks for their browsers.
  4. Who is the intended audience for the links? It could only be the Pi-Hole administrator, since the links would be of no use to anybody without login access to the Pi-Hole.

How does it make us a better DNS server?

It does make it a better manageable server.

We aren't a server management platform nor a sever management product. That's RPIMon. We're a DNS server.

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The Pi-Hole logo link already leads to GitHub, home page (then to discourse, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub, etc). This gets a user to any of the official support sites.

To add to what has been said before, adding more features just because it is easy to do this is risky. Not only that some initial work needs to be done (you could ease this step with submitting a pull request), the maintenance work will unavoidably become part of the general developer's workload. Example: We're planing to replace the current, organically grown PHP-based web interface by a modern alternative. Everything that is currently there will need to be ported over or user's using it will (justifiably) complain. And this is just the most simple example that came immediately to my mind.

With avoiding feature bloat we had to reject a number of other feature requests in the past.

Else than that I can see some value in having this list of links on, e.g., www.pi-hole.net but I think it might already been there on github.com

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Added the entire procedure here, took me 4 hours, NOT a Linux expert, nor a PHP expert.

Why add on to Pi-hole for this, instead of adding on to any of the other services you have? You can make a small HTML page and host it somewhere else on your server. That would be easier for everyone.