We have set up a Raspberry Pi 5 system to run a third PiHole DNS server in our network. This ensures that DNS services are available even if our other servers are down.
To make this PiHole easy to manage, we configured our Raspberry Pi to run Docker. This enables us to manage the PiHole installation on the Pi from the Portainer instance that is used to manage our Docker Swarm Cluster.
We are also running the Traefik reverse proxy. Traefik is used to provide an SSL certificate for our PiHole.
Raspberry Pi Hardware
Our docker host consists of a PoE-powered Raspberry Pi 5 system. The hardware components used include:
OS Installation
We are running the 64-bit Lite version (no GUI desktop) of Raspberry Pi OS. The configuration steps on the initial boot include:
- Setting the keyboard layout to English (US)
- Setting a unique user name
- Setting a strong password
After the system is booted, we used sudo raspi-config to set the following additional options:
- Updated raspi-config to the latest version
- Set the system’s hostname
- Enable ssh
- Set the Timezone
- Configure predictable network names
- Expand the filesystem to use all of the space on our flash card
Next, we did a sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade to update our system and rebooted.
Finally, we created and ran a script to install our SSH keys on the system, and we verified that SSH access was working. With this done, we ran our ansible configuration script to install the standard set of tools and utilities that we use on our Linux systems.
Mail Forwarding
We will need to forward emails from containers and scripts on the system. To do this, we set up email forwarding using the procedure here.
Docker/Docker Compose Installation
Installing Docker and the Docker Compose plugin involves a series of command line steps on the RPi. To automate this process, we created a script that runs on our Ubunutu Admin server. The steps required for these installations are covered in the following video:
Steps to install Docker and Docker Compose on a Raspberry Pi
Some important adjustments to the steps in the video included:
- Installed the Docker Compose plugin instead of Docker Compose. The procedure to install the plugin can be found here.
The installation can be verified at the end with the following commands:
# docker --version # docker compose version # docker run hello-world
Portainer Agent
We installed the Portainer Edge agent using the following command, which is run on the RPi:
# docker run -d \ -p 9001:9001 \ --name portainer_agent \ --restart=always \ -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \ -v /var/lib/docker/volumes:/var/lib/docker/volumes \ portainer/agent:2.19.5
The final step is to connect the Edge Agent to our Portainer.
Traefik Reverse Proxy and PiHole with Cloudflare Tunnel
Our software service stack for our Raspberry Pi includes the following applications:
- PiHole – Ad blocking DNS server
- Cloudflare Tunnel – For encrypted DNS lookups via the Internet
- Traefik – Reverse Proxy with SSL Encryption
These applications are installed via custom scripts, and Docker Compose using a single stack. Our combined stack was created using a combination of the information in the following videos:
Deploy PiHole with Cloudflare Tunnel in Docker
Scheduled Block List Updates
We must update our piHole block list by doing a Gravity pull. We do this daily via a cron job. This can be configured on the RPi host using the following commands –
# Edit the user crontab sudo crontab -u <user-id> -e # The following to the user crontab min hr * * * su ubuntu -c /usr/bin/docker exec pihole pihole -g | /usr/bin/mailx -s"RPi Docker - Gravity Pull" [email protected]
Cloudflare DDNS
We host our domains externally on Cloudflare. We use Docker containers to keep our external IP address up to date in Cloudflare’s DNS system. You can learn about how to set this up here.
Watchtower
We are running the Watchtower container to keep our containers on our RPi Docker host up to date. You can learn more about Watchtower and how to install it here.
Backups
We back up our Raspberry Pi Docker host using Synology ActiveBackup for business running on one of our Synology NAS drives.