your-dns

A docker-compose file to provide a secure adblocking DNS server

NOTE: if you are interested in a hosted solution, please take a look at nextdns.io. I'm not affiliated with nextdns.io.

All components in this stack

1. Unbound: This is the actual DNS server that provide DNS-over-TLS service at TCP port 853. Unbound will forward DNS request to pihole's 53 port over UDP.
2. Pihole: Ad blocking DNS server. Pihole forked dnsmasq and provide a nice UI to manage the server.
3. Stubby DNS: A DNS stub server, which support forwarding DNS request to upstream DNS-over-TLS server. Note Unbound also support forwarding request to upstream over TLS, but I was told (can't find the reference) Unbound does not reuse TLS connections which is a concern to me (my ATT gateway has an internal NAT table with limited # of entries).
4. Pomerium: A identity-aware reverse proxy. This allows me to remote access PiHole's web UI.
5. Certbot: Free Let's Encrypt certification (required by DNS-over-TLS).
6. Autoheal: Auto-restart container that failed health check.
7. Ouroboros: Auto-pull latest version of each container.

Run the stack

1. Create a network called infra_network

    docker network create --subnet 172.30.0.0/16 infra_network

2. Create an .env file in the directory of docker-compose.yaml file with the following content:

DNS_DOMAIN_NAME=dns.example.com
# Optional, if you want remote access to pihole web UI
# See https://www.pomerium.io/docs/identity-providers.html on detailed
# instruction.
POMERIUM_CLIENT_ID=YOUR_CLIENT_ID
POMERIUM_CLIENT_SECRET=YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET

# Generate two random strings using `head -c32 /dev/urandom | base64`
POMERIUM_SHARED_SECRET=YOUR_RANDOM_STRING
POMERIUM_COOKIE_SECRET=YOUR_RANDOM_STRING

3. Configure certbot to generate certificate for your DNS server's domain name. This is a tricky part, in order to ease the setup, I switched to cloudflare as my name server and uses certbot/dns-cloudflare image to get certificate via DNS challenge. You'll likely need to adjust this part to your own situation.
4. docker-compose up -d and you are done :-)

(well I omitted a lot, i.e. you need configuration for unbound/stubby/pomerium. Until those are ready, please refer to each project's documentation on how to configure everything.)

TODO

1. Detailed instruction on how to turn this into a working stack.
2. DNS-over-HTTPS support (Personally not using any device that supports it.