How to Use AdGuard Home: The Beginner's Guide to Network-Wide Ad Blocking

CodexFuse Team · 2026-10-31T11:38:14.858Z · 14 min read

AdGuard Home is a free, open-source DNS server that blocks ads, trackers, and malicious domains for every device on your network — phones, laptops, smart TVs, and even IoT gadgets — without installing anything on any of them. If you are tired of installing a separate ad blocker on every phone and browser you own, learning how to use AdGuard Home replaces all of that with one machine that filters the whole house.

This AdGuard Home tutorial is the complete beginner arc: the one-line install, the static-IP rule that keeps your whole network from losing the internet, the :3000 setup wizard, the router-DNS change that actually sends traffic through it, the blocklist-stack rule, blocked services, encrypted DNS upstreams, and the honest limit — what DNS blocking can never do. If you have read a Pi-hole beginner guide before, AdGuard Home is Pi-hole's closest sibling: same job, but with a built-in DHCP server and encrypted-DNS upstreams out of the box, so the line between the two products matters when you pick one.

What Is AdGuard Home?

AdGuard Home is a network-wide ads and trackers blocking DNS server you run on your own hardware. Every device on your home network asks the internet where to find the websites and ads it loads; when AdGuard Home is your network's DNS server, it checks each of those requests against filter lists and simply answers "that domain does not exist" for known advertisers and trackers. The ad never loads, and the tracking pixel never phones home.

The project is open source under the GPL-3.0 license, maintained by the AdGuard team, with roughly 38,000 GitHub stars. The latest stable release, v0.107.79, was published on August 18, 2026. It runs on almost anything that stays on — a Raspberry Pi, a mini PC, a home server, or a cheap VPS — and it exposes a clean web dashboard where you see every DNS query on your network, in real time.

How Do You Use AdGuard Home?

The short answer is: install it on one always-on machine, give that machine a static IP, point your router's DNS at that IP, and let its blocklists do the rest. Here is the full beginner arc in order:

1. Pick an always-on machine — a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, a mini PC, a home server, or a VPS.
2. Give the machine a static IP (or a DHCP reservation in your router) before anything else.
3. Install AdGuard Home with the official one-line installer.
4. Open the setup wizard at http://YOUR-IP:3000, set the admin and DNS ports, and create your admin account.
5. Point your router's DNS at the machine's IP so every device on the network routes its lookups through AdGuard Home.
6. Stack your blocklists — start with the default AdGuard DNS filter, then add one comprehensive list and tune.
7. Switch on blocked services and encrypted upstreams if you want them, and learn the YouTube-ads limit so your expectations are honest.

What Do You Need Before You Install?

Three things must be true before AdGuard Home touches your network. First, the machine that will run it must have a static IP address on your local network — or a DHCP reservation in the router — because once the router points every device's DNS at this machine, an IP change would silently kill the whole network's internet. Second, port 53 must be free on that machine, since AdGuard Home's DNS listener needs the standard DNS port. Third, nothing else on the box can already own the web-admin port you plan to use.

Here are the ports AdGuard Home uses, so you can plan around them:

How Do You Install AdGuard Home?

On Linux, the official install is a single command that downloads the latest stable release, installs it as a system service, and leaves you ready for the wizard:

curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v

Prefer wget? This does the same thing:

wget --no-verbose -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v

The installer puts AdGuard Home in /opt/AdGuardHome/ and registers it as a systemd service, so it starts automatically at boot. Once the install finishes, open http://YOUR-MACHINE-IP:3000 in a browser on the same network — that is the setup wizard, and it only appears this once.

How Do You Install AdGuard Home on a Raspberry Pi?

An AdGuard Home Raspberry Pi build is the classic home setup: cheap, silent, and always on. Update the Pi first, then run the same one-liner — the installer handles the ARM architecture for you:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -v

A Raspberry Pi 3 or newer handles a household network fine; a Pi 4 or Pi 5 gives you headroom for logging and encrypted upstreams. Before the router step, set the Pi's static IP (or its DHCP reservation) — this is the step beginners skip, and it is the one that breaks everything later.

If you want to run AdGuard Home outside your home — on a rented server you control instead — read our explainer on what is VPS hosting first so the networking trade-offs are clear.

How Do You Run AdGuard Home with Docker?

If your home server already runs Docker, AdGuard Home ships as an official container image, adguard/adguardhome. A minimal compose file maps the ports the server needs and keeps the configuration and working data on the host:

services:
  adguardhome:
    image: adguard/adguardhome
    container_name: adguardhome
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "67:67/udp"
      - "68:68/udp"
      - "80:80/tcp"
      - "443:443/tcp"
      - "443:443/udp"
      - "3000:3000/tcp"
      - "853:853/tcp"
    volumes:
      - ./work:/opt/adguardhome/work
      - ./conf:/opt/adguardhome/conf

Two Docker-specific facts matter. First, auto-updates are disabled in Docker installations by design — the Update button inside the AdGuard Home interface will not work. To update, pull the new image and recreate the container. Second, port 53 must be reachable on the host; if another DNS stub is squatting on it, the container's DNS listener cannot start. If you are new to containers, our Docker beginner guide covers compose basics before you come back.

What Does the Setup Wizard Ask For?

The wizard at port 3000 walks you through four decisions, and none of them is hard if you have read this far. First it asks for the admin web interface port — 80 by default. Change it only if the machine already serves websites (3000 or 8080 are the usual alternatives). Then it confirms the DNS server port — leave this at 53. Then you create your admin username and password, with at least ten characters recommended.

When the wizard completes, log in at the admin port you chose — not :3000 anymore. The :3000 wizard is a one-time setup screen; keeping the admin UI on it after setup is a beginner habit, not a configuration. While you are logged in, open the dashboard and watch the query log for a minute: every lookup your network makes is already flowing through your new server.

How Do You Point Your Router at AdGuard Home?

An AdGuard Home router change is the step that turns a single-machine install into whole-house protection. Log in to your router's admin panel (usually 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1), find the DHCP / DNS / LAN settings section, and set the Primary DNS server to your AdGuard Home machine's IP — for example 192.168.1.150. Every device that joins your network will then use AdGuard Home for DNS automatically, with no per-device setup.

1. Log in to your router's admin panel (typically 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1).
2. Open the DHCP, LAN, or DNS settings page — every router brands it differently.
3. Set Primary DNS to your AdGuard Home machine's static IP.
4. Leave Secondary DNS blank or set a backup you trust; a blank secondary is the standard beginner setup.
5. Save, then reboot your devices or wait for DHCP leases to renew.

Verify it worked by visiting the AdGuard Home dashboard and checking the query log while a phone loads a news site — you should see blocked ad and tracker domains lighting up in red. If you cannot change your router's DNS at all (some ISP routers lock it down), the fallback is per-device DNS: set each device's DNS server to the AdGuard Home IP manually.

Which Blocklists Should You Use?

AdGuard Home blocklists are filter subscriptions — lists of domains known to serve ads, trackers, or malware — and the product ships with the AdGuard DNS filter enabled by default, so filtering works the moment setup completes. That default is deliberately conservative: it blocks the obvious junk without breaking websites.

To filter more aggressively, open Filters → DNS blocklists → Add blocklist → Add a custom list and add one community-maintained list at a time. The starter stack most home setups land on is:

The blocklist-stack rule is this: add one list, live with it for a few days, and only add the next one if something is still getting through. Stacking five aggressive lists on day one is how beginners end up blocking their smart TV's firmware check or a bank's login page, and the fix is always the same — disable lists one by one until the site works again. For households with kids, the Filters menu also carries parental-control blocklists.

How Do Blocked Services and Encrypted DNS Work?

Blocklists handle ad domains; Blocked services (under Filters) handle whole platforms. This is a catalog of specific sites and services — social networks, video platforms, messengers — that you can block with one click per device profile. It is the parental-control fast lane: block TikTok at dinner time for the kids' tablets without touching DNS records.

Encrypted DNS is the privacy half. In Settings → DNS settings you choose your upstream servers — and AdGuard Home supports DNS-over-HTTPS, DNS-over-TLS, and DNS-over-QUIC out of the box, so your ISP can no longer read every domain your household looks up. In Settings → Encryption you can generate a certificate to serve encrypted DNS yourself. If you want to reach your AdGuard Home server securely from outside your home network, pair it with a private mesh — our Tailscale beginner guide shows the pattern.

AdGuard Home vs Pi-hole: Which Should You Choose?

The AdGuard Home vs Pi-hole question has no universal winner — they block the same ads the same way, and both run happily on a Pi. The differences that decide are the ones AdGuard Home builds in: a built-in DHCP server, so it can hand out addresses and register hostnames without your router's help; encrypted DNS upstreams (DoH/DoT/DoQ) without extra daemons; and the blocked services catalog for one-click platform blocking. Pi-hole counters with a larger community and a famously simple interface.

Choose AdGuard Home if you want the all-in-one package — DHCP, encrypted upstreams, and service blocking in the same dashboard. Choose Pi-hole if you prefer its ecosystem and do not need the extras.

Should You Turn On AdGuard Home's Built-in DHCP Server?

AdGuard Home DHCP is the feature Pi-hole made you buy extra hardware for: your AdGuard Home machine can hand out IP addresses to every device on the network, registering hostnames in the dashboard so the query log shows friendly device names instead of raw IPs. It is useful on networks where the router's DHCP is weak or unmanageable.

But it is strictly optional, and the rule is absolute: never run two DHCP servers on the same network. If you turn on AdGuard Home's built-in DHCP, you must turn OFF the DHCP server on your router first. Two DHCP servers fighting over the same network hand out conflicting addresses and break connectivity in ways that look like mysterious, intermittent outages. Most beginners should leave DHCP on the router and let AdGuard Home do DNS only.

Can AdGuard Home Block YouTube Ads?

No — and any guide that promises otherwise is lying to you. AdGuard Home works at the DNS level: it blocks requests to known ad domains. YouTube serves its video ads from the same domains as the videos themselves, so a DNS blocker cannot tell an ad from a video. The same limit applies to most in-app ads and sponsored posts inside feeds.

This is not an AdGuard Home failure; it is a DNS-blocking limit shared by every network-level blocker. The honest setup is a layered one: AdGuard Home for everything it can block network-wide, plus a device-level ad blocker (like a browser extension or an app) for the same-domain ads it cannot. Set the expectation correctly on day one and you will never be disappointed.

How Do You Keep AdGuard Home Healthy?

Maintenance is small but real. Blocklists update themselves automatically — that is the hands-off part. The application itself needs updating: on a bare-metal install, re-running the one-line installer pulls the newest release, and the dashboard's Update button handles minor releases. On Docker, remember that the Update button does nothing by design — pull the new image and recreate the container instead.

Back up your configuration before any update: Settings → General settings → Export configuration (or copy the conf directory on Docker). And glance at the query log now and then — a sudden spike of blocked queries from one device is often a misbehaving app worth investigating.

Sources

• AdGuard Home releases — v0.107.79, published August 18, 2026; repository stats: ~38,000 stars, GPL-3.0 (GitHub API, fetched October 31, 2026)
• AdGuard Home install one-liner and the :3000 wizard, admin port 80, DNS port 53 — dev.to AdGuard Home setup guide (updated ~25 days ago)
• Router-level DHCP DNS change and the official installation flow — communityconduit.net AdGuard Home guide (crawled October 31, 2026)
• ASUS official support FAQ — AdGuard Home installation and setup on ASUS AI routers
• Default AdGuard DNS filter, Docker update behavior, the YouTube-ads DNS limit, and port requirements — ZimaOS AdGuard Home documentation (updated October 29, 2026)
• Blocked services catalog and DoH/DoT upstream options — dev.to AdGuard Home setup guide (updated ~25 days ago)
• Starter blocklist stack: AdGuard DNS filter default plus StevenBlack hosts and oisd full — communityconduit.net AdGuard Home guide (crawled October 31, 2026)
• DNS mechanics background — verified against CodexFuse's own DNS lookup tool: a domain's DNS records are exactly the records AdGuard Home filters

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a Raspberry Pi to run AdGuard Home?

No. A Pi is the classic choice, but AdGuard Home runs on any always-on machine: a mini PC, a home server, an old laptop, or even a cheap VPS. The only hard requirements are a stable machine, a static local IP, and a free port 53.

Will AdGuard Home slow down my internet?

For most households it makes browsing feel faster, not slower. Blocked ad and tracker requests never download, which removes the slowest part of many pages. DNS lookups themselves are cached locally, so repeated visits resolve instantly. The only slowdown case is an underpowered box struggling under encrypted-DNS crypto — on a Pi 4 or better you will not notice it.

Does AdGuard Home protect devices outside my home?

Not by default — DNS only works for devices on your network. If you want filtering on your phone while you travel, you either point the phone at a VPS-hosted AdGuard Home instance with encrypted DNS, or you join your home network remotely through a private VPN mesh. Both are advanced but well documented.

Do I have to update blocklists myself?

No. AdGuard Home refreshes its blocklists automatically on its own schedule. Your only manual job is updating the application itself — re-run the installer, use the dashboard Update button, or (on Docker) recreate the container with the new image.

Is AdGuard Home free forever?

Yes. It is open source under the GPL-3.0 license, maintained by the AdGuard team, with no premium tier, no account, and no cloud dependency. Your filters and your query logs never leave your machine.