Need to clean reinstall

[luagh45]

My Pi-hole has long since stopped updating. For that I am still running v.4.1.1. I've meant to uninstall and reinstall it, but it "worked". Now I'm in need of some of the newer features, and I finally want to do this. For any background information you can see my last post here. But basically I need to delete the /etc/.pihole directory and /var/www/html/admin directory and run the installer.

I'm not sure however if I'll need to reset my router before hand so that it's not using the pi-hole when I try to run the installer or if there are ways to save and later update white or blacklisted items if I can get a clean instal just by entering rm -rf /etc/.pihole, then rm -rf /var/www/html/admin, and curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash. I know this is vague, but basically I'm trying to make this as seamless as possible so I don't end up with an upset wife or kids because I broke the internet.

[MichaIng]

Why not use pihole -up?

EDIT: Ah I read the linked thread. Then yes the series of commands should work fine. But I personally would backup them, just in case:

mv /etc/.pihole{,_bak}
mv /var/www/html/admin{,_bak}
curl -sSfL 'https://install.pi-hole.net' | bash

When everything worked well, you can remove the backups:

rm -r /etc/.pihole_bak
rm -r /var/www/html/admin_bak

Pi-hole btw keeps running, the files are only relevant for the web interface and the CLI, but not for the actual FTL/DNS process.

[luagh45]

I like creating a backup. Thanks for the suggestion. And just confirming that because I'm only deleting the web interface that this method should not result in any downtime to the internet assuming it works?

[MichaIng]

Pi-hole doesn't have any control or effect on the internet being up or down, but what you likely mean is that it still answers DNS requests during that process. And yes, as said, the files you are removing are not related to the DNS related part of Pi-hole, so that stays all active. The installer AFAIK restarts the service once, after the binary has been updated, so there will be a downtime of a second or so.

But of course yes that all under the assumption that everything goes well. When you're doing a Pi-hole or system upgrade, you should always be prepared/able to, in worst case, switch router or client settings back to an upstream DNS, just in case something goes wrong, so a similar precaution like a backup . So you're not in time pressure to investigate and result issues.