AdGuard Home Sync: Sync Your AdGuard Home Instances!

Currently I’m running my own DNS server at home; AdGuard Home. While this runs perfectly, I had one issue…

Whenever I needed to update the docker, even though the update usually takes a couple of minutes, no internet was possible since the docker was being updated. This bothered me a lot and I had to think about an improvement.

The answer turned out to be simple: I needed a second AdGuard Home instance on my Synology NAS. While setting this up was straightforward, it also meant that I had to maintain two instances. That’s where AdGuard Home Sync comes in!

AdGuard Home Sync

AdGuard Home Sync is a Docker container which allows you to synchronize AdGuard Home configuration to replica instances. This is exactly what I needed! By default the following features are being synced, but you can adjust them to your needs. That’s what I did as I only need to synchronize some of the configuration.

• General Settings
• Filters
• Rewrites
• Services
• Clients
• DNS Config
• DHCP Config
• Theme

How To Install?

The GitHub page provides multiple ways of setting up AdGuard Home Sync, but my favorite approach is using a Docker Compose file:

---
version: "2.1"
services:
  adguardhome-sync:
    image: ghcr.io/bakito/adguardhome-sync
    container_name: adguardhome-sync
    command: run --config /config/adguardhome-sync.yaml
    volumes:
      - /path/to/appdata/config/adguardhome-sync.yaml:/config/adguardhome-sync.yaml
    ports:
      - 8080:8080
    restart: unless-stopped

Setting up AdGuard Home Sync

This is extremely easy! Simply locate the adguardhome-sync.yaml and adjust it to your needs. Once configured, everything should work just fine, usually! 😉

No route to host?

Yeah, usually… After adjusting the .yaml file, I kept getting a “No Route To Host” error. Fortunately the solution was easy as I found out that this was related to Portainer’s Bridge network:

In case of issues with No such host and/or no route to host:
Seems with a custom bridge network **(not the default bridge)**, DNS name resolution is native so using the container name is the preferred method to ensure containers can always talk to one another. So I created a network within Portainer called AdGuardSync. Your AGH instance should now be part of two networks; the macvlan and the AdGuardSync network!

So as soon as I created a custom bridge network within Portainer, the issue was immediately solved and it’s been working without any issues so far! Now my AdGuard Home Instance is now part of two networks:

1. MAC VLAN (For external communication)
2. AdGuardSync Bridge (For Internal communication)

Conclusion:

This docker container is an absolute must-have if you’re running multiple AdGuard Home instances! Now I can update my main and replica instance without any DNS downtime. As a bonus I always have something to fall back on to! This makes things a bit easier!

While dealing with the logs and the “No Route To Host” issue, I learned something new: DNS name solution resolutions works natively with custom bridge networks, but not with the default bridge! That was unexpected, but a good lesson!