Coming from Umbrel - anything like Pi-Hole available?

My old rPi4 served me well, but when it ran out of space I decided to treat myself to a Start9 Server to upgrade my home node. I’m very happy with it, but one use case for my Umbrel outside of Bitcoin was as a pi-hole adblocking service.

I found a post from mid 2023 that suggested Pi-hole was coming to Start9 with release v040

I don’t see any package for Pi-Hole in either repository mid 2025, so I’m wondering what is the state of intent to add Pi-Hole (and are we ever getting 0.4.0)? I note my Start9 server is still on 0.3.5~1 but says its ‘up to date’, and a post from November of 2024 says that Start9 is on the verge of upgrading to 0.3.6

I asked ChatGPT if it could help guide me to build a docker container for Pi-hole and it gave me some instructions that reference embassy-OS and adding the .s9pk file via a deprecated method in the GUI. It also suggested that Pi-hole listening on port 53 and 80 would conflict with Start9 existing services (like Unbound DNS and internal Start9 web services) and may require custom port configuration and / or disabling conflicting services. ChatGPT also brought up that Start9’s sandboxing and permissions model may require tweaks to allow low-level DNS port access. And that “Start9’s developers generally recommend using AdGuard Home (already in the Marketplace) instead of Pi-hole, because it integrates more easily and avoids port conflicts.”

However, I don’t see AdGuard Home in the repository either.

Is there any update or opinion on Pi-hole, or AdGuard Home for Start9? I really would like to retire the rPi4 if I can add the functionality to Start9.

Not currently. I don’t “KNOW,” but I’ll bet thee are projects like that waiting for port access to service containers. Currently the .local only LAN interfaces to the containers is probably a limiting factor. The next version of StartOS changes this. If you’re interested in seeing a specific service available on StartOS please reach out to the devs for that software, and ask them to package for StartOS.

This post here, may also help with better understanding out software strategy.

Thanks Rexter, out of curiosity, I’ve seen that Start OS is planning on moving to 0.4 for quite a while now, as evidenced by the 2023 thread above suggesting it was ‘coming soon’…Are there any threads on development of 0.4 and when the upgrade will hit? It would be nice to know when we can expect it.

StartOS 040 is currently on the last steps of internal Alpha testing and should be ready pretty soon for public Beta release.

We will make sure to make announcements so that all users are aware of the release when it does come.

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