Nothing wrong, but I would really love a way to update my pi-hole without having to use the console & a web update option would fit the bill perfectly. If this has already been requested, please accept my apology for this repeated request!!
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For various technical reasons, this is not possible.
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I cannot accept that. I tried Adguardhome beforehand and it is very possible. And in. in principle it is structured similarly. What is the exact technical reason why it shouldn't work?
You can't restart a webserver while it's serving pages. But feel free to use AdGuard Home if it solves your issues.
Rest assured that we're always trying to bring the best experience to our users. In fact, we have tried hard to achieve web updates for Pi-hole. However, we have not found a way to ensure it will work in 100% of the cases. Some edge-cases might have brought users into situations where the networking of the Pi was severely broken and this seemed totally unacceptable to us. Other projects might have a different opinion on how to deal with "minorities".
Moreover, another reason is that we're properly relying on system-provided packages instead of forcing users to specific package version (which may even be outdated). There are reasons how other can get things going, but I don't want to go any details of this here. It will not lead to anything.
However, with Pi-hole v6.0, we're looking at a radical change in the architecture where we're dropping a lot of the dependencies on system-provided packages like dropping lighttpd and, in general, making the entire ecosystem easier. No promises that v6.0 will contain web-updates, however, it will certainly make it much easier for us to realize them. This does not mean that I can already foresee if all possible problems could be solved. But maybe v6.1 will finally enable this? We will see is the best I can say now. We will benefit most from being honest with ourselves.
It's not that I like Adguard home better than Pihole, and I envy your work. But there are a few points that you could take over and not just defiantly say it doesn't work. I know a little bit about the console and the command shouldn't be called # /etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
If you can figure out how to make this work, we would welcome the pull request.
That said, how often does your Pi-hole get updated? We released the current version on May 18, and the previous release was on Feb 25. Updating Pi-hole isn't something that is done daily.
Give it a go then.
TL;DR of my post above focusing on this statement of yours:
I have not
I even gave reasons for why it doesn't work right now. And I also explained why it may work for others but we want to make sure to cover all users, not just the majority. And because Pi-hole is a very open project where users can change almost anything, we're faced with a lot of vastly varying configurations that are not always easy to set up.
One may argue that the minority with complex configurations should not be considered as they are "power-users" that know what they are doing and can help themselves, however, I commonly see (when looking at debug logs) that this is not the case. There is a ton of this-is-my-first-Linux-and-networking-project that received help with their specific needs leading to complex custom configurations as this platform here is very powerful with a lot of very knowledgeable users. Still, if an automated update of Pi-hole fails for them, they are lost and maybe cannot recover easily. We don't want this to happen.