Disable/enable Pi-hole using Apple Shortcuts

Published: 2022.12.01 · 2 minutes read

Pi-hole is my favourite ad-blocking solution. It runs on Raspberry Pi hooked under my desk, and its only purpose is network-wide DNS filtering. “The World’s Greatest Pi-hole Tutorial 2023” by Crosstalk Solutions is an excellent primer if you are new to the subject.

In most cases, it works like a charm, but from time to time, you just want to disable it temporarily. You can stop it via CLI using pihole disable command, but this one required SSH login. It just takes too long, and on a mobile device, this is cumbersome. Look at some examples.

# Disable Pi-hole for 30 seconds
pihole disable 30s

# Disable Pi-hole for 8 minutes
pihole disable 8m

Pi-hole during the installation phase lets us install an optional web interface which also allows us to stop/start blocking. This is easier than the previous method but still painful, especially on touch devices.

Apple Shortcuts for the rescue #

I spent a few minutes creating this little shortcut that ticks all the boxes for an easy and quick to use method for flipping between Pi-hole blocking states. I built it once on macOS, but thanks to the iCloud sync, I can also use it on iPadOS and iOS.

As you can see, calling Pi-hole API requires an authentication key. You can get it using Web Interface or by checking the Pi-hole setup configuration file.

# Get auth key
cat /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf | grep WEBPASSWORD

# Example how to disable Pi-hole using HTTP request
curl "http://pi.hole/admin/api.php?disable=30&auth=${WEBPASSWORD}"

# Example how to enable Pi-hole using HTTP request
curl "http://pi.hole/admin/api.php?enable&auth=${WEBPASSWORD}"

I hope you found it helpful. Until next time, keep on building cool shit 💩

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