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Dev tools · August 18, 2022

PH

Pi-hole deployed at the edge on Fly.io and accessed via TailScale

Hi, I just saw this tweet[^1] by @QuinnyPig that mentions accessing your Pi-hole while traveling thanks to TailScale and wondered how to deploy Pi-hole at the edge, instead of a home lab, for improved latency. My simple solution involves running it on Fly.io to make it easy to relocate anywhere, and embedding tailscale into the same firecracker VM (né docker container) to keep the infra dead simple and cheap. Naively deploying a publicly accessible DNS resolver is not ideal[^2] so the main constraint was to secure the VM by 1) keeping all public ports closed and 2) having Pi-hole listen only…

In plain words

This is a deployment guide for running Pi-hole, a DNS-level ad blocker, on Fly.io using TailScale for secure remote access. The solution is designed for developers and system administrators who want to use Pi-hole while traveling with reduced latency compared to home lab setups. It runs both Pi-hole and TailScale in a single lightweight VM at the edge, keeping all public ports closed and restricting DNS queries to the private TailScale network for security.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi, I just saw this tweet[^1] by @QuinnyPig that mentions accessing your Pi-hole while traveling thanks to TailScale and wondered how to deploy Pi-hole at the edge, instead of a home lab, for improved latency. My simple solution involves running it on Fly.io to make it easy to relocate anywhere, and embedding tailscale into the same firecracker VM (né docker container) to keep the infra dead simple and cheap. Naively deploying a publicly accessible DNS resolver is not ideal[^2] so the main constraint was to secure the VM by 1) keeping all public ports closed and 2) having Pi-hole listen only on the private network interface created by TailScale. It's all very straightforward but it's noticeably improved my bandwidth usage and page loading times across my laptop and mobile phone, so I figured I'd share. Suggestions for improvement are also welcome! [^1]: https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1558521941538983936 [^2]: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/dns-amplification-d...

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