Pihole v6 beta baremetal on Alpine?

RogerSik · October 15, 2023, 2:49pm

With the Pihole v6 Alpine docker images means this that we can (maybe now in beta?) install pihole on baremetal alpine?

DanSchaper · October 15, 2023, 5:14pm

You'll need to add bash at the bare minimum but the only way to know for sure is to try.

PromoFaux · October 15, 2023, 5:40pm

Yea and no.

Take a look over the docker file to see how we set it up, which basically "manually" runs specific parts of the install script

github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole

src/Dockerfile

27b4c8a1b

ARG CONTAINER="3.18"
FROM alpine:${CONTAINER}
# https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/#automatic-platform-args-in-the-global-scope

ARG TARGETPLATFORM
ARG WEB_BRANCH="development-v6"
ARG CORE_BRANCH="development-v6"
ARG FTL_BRANCH="development-v6"
ARG PIHOLE_DOCKER_TAG="unknown"
ARG PADD_BRANCH="PADD_FTLv6"

ENV DNSMASQ_USER=pihole
ENV FTL_CMD=no-daemon

RUN apk add --no-cache \
    bash \
    bind-tools \
    binutils \
    coreutils \
    curl \

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RogerSik · October 25, 2023, 9:48am

Thanks! I think stay with container. Alpine as VM and Docker together are so lightweight, that i don't really feel a difference (when used network_mode: host).

An awesome thanks for the work and alpine Container

PromoFaux · October 25, 2023, 10:02am

Probably a good decision, much easier to keep up to date than having to manually go through the install steps each time

donluca · February 28, 2025, 5:59pm

Would it be possible to "convert" the dockerfile to a simple shell script to make life easier for us Alpine Linux user?

I don't use Docker (my Alpine Linux vm is in a jail on FreeBSD) so it would be really helpful!

PromoFaux · February 28, 2025, 11:49pm

Copy paste from a Reddit question asking the same thing:

Yes and no.

The no part:

The install script will not allow you to install on Alpine, as it is not officially supported on a bare metal system. That's not to say it wont in the future - it's just not a focus currently. I imagine the number of people running Alpine on bare metal is relatively minimal.

The yes part:

Pi-hole will run on Alpine, but you would need to manually configure everything. Things like the update script etc would not work.

The docker image is switching from a Debian base to an Alpine base - it should be farely trivial to manually follow what the Dockerfile is doing... or you could also just install Docker and run the container version

donluca · March 1, 2025, 12:09pm

The question stemmed from that thread, actually, where you suggested to follow what the dockerfile was doing.
I took a peek inside and it looked to me like a series of commands which could be translated to a bash script for bare metal installation, hence my question on converting it.

My current situation is that I installed pihole a long time ago via yvelon / pi-hole · GitLab but with the last update it half-borked the installation because the FTL and "main" pihole stayed at the "custom" version and the web part updated at v6.

My fix was to manually download the official v6 FTL because I figured that now that Docker image is using Alpine, the newer FTL builds are probably compatible "out of the box", which was the case.
I then had to redo part of the configuration via the web interface and it is now working.

The only thing that I don't really like much is that now I have the "base" pihole stuck at commit 0c6b70fa of yvelon / pi-hole · GitLab and the web interface and FTL at the latest "official" v6 and everytime I update I have to manually update the FTL by downloading it and replacing it (which I can definitely script it when running pihole -up, but still).

I don't know what yvelon has done with his pihole fork, but now that "official" FTL and webUI are working out of the box with Alpine, how hard would it be to make it completely compatible?

PromoFaux · March 3, 2025, 6:15pm

Some additional changes would still be needed in the main Pi-hole repo for it to work.

The main issues I can think of:

package manager support, would need apk adding
service/systemd scripts - are they nessacerily compatible with an OOTB alpine install?
update scripts etc may not work due to bash dependency. In an ideal world we would make all the scripts posix compliant, but it's a lot of work!

Although the Docker image is now running on alpine, it's not following the bare metal installation methods, i.e we set it up manually and don't worry about any of the incidental scripts/service wrappers etc - and we can do this because each release is self-contained and is updated by replacing the entire image.

Not saying it's impossible, it's just probably not a priority at this stage