Any plans for a WEB GUI ?

[shahidcodes]

Using blocky and really enjoying it. I was previously using PiHole which has a nice UI to inspect what's going to and stuffs. Just wanted to ask if there is any plan for any GUI?

[0xERR0R]

Hey,

no, currently not. There is a Grafana dashboard for prometheus metrics, which shows some internal metrics and allows to enable/disable the blocking state.

I'm also currently working on (#258). This will allow to create another Grafana dashboard with detailed statistics about asked queries (e.g. top 20 asked domains, Top 20 blocked domains, last queries etc).

I'm trying to follow the KISS principle and implement only core features (basically DNS features) and provide integration for other tools (REST api, prometheus integration).

[shahidcodes]

That's great. If there's a way to communicate to blocky through api to fetch and manage things like upstream dns, clients, customDNS, client groups, block lists and so on then I think it'll be easier for me or anyone else to write a frontend.

At least for now I'm waiting for the WIP: logging query to database so that at least I can fetch the data from the database and see.

[0xERR0R]

No, currently, you can only control the blocking (enable, disable), trigger the list refresh and perform a DNS query.

Here is the current REST API description: https://0xerr0r.github.io/blocky/swagger.html

[Mozart409]

Should I create a new frontend?

[Mozart409]

Thank you. Any things I should change or add? Yes I can keep it there and you can link it. Are you planning to expand the REST API?

[0xERR0R]

If you need a new REST endpoint -> please feel free to create an issue.

Maybe following things as idea:

• add a screenshot to the readme
• use multi-arch docker build to support arm6/7 etc. -> this would allow to use the web client on Raspberry pi and routers
• button to disable blocking for 5 min
• dark mode ;)

[Mozart409]

@0xERR0R Hi, can you teach me how to create multi-arch docker images?

[kwitsch]

The build-and-push action you aleady use supports this feature as it uses buildx internally.
Simply add the platformes you like to bundle together in the with section.

[Mozart409]

@kwitsch thank you very much.

[GabeDuarteM]

@0xERR0R Hey 👋 I was having some problems running the existing blocky-frontend, and since I was also missing a few features, I decided to build a new GUI for Blocky implementing the endpoints available through the API, and from this, BlockyUI was born:

It shows you the current state of the DNS server, allows you to enable and disable it (using timers too), allows you to clear the cache and reload the allow/deny lists, and lastly, you can also perform DNS queries with it (and if you use blocky with a DB, you can also view the query log history).

Feel free to check the repo out, it has deploy instructions there, and also please let me know if you have any feedbacks or ideas! 😄

[0xERR0R]

Hi, nice and clean UI, looks very promising. Didn't test it yes, but will try it out. As feedback from the first look, pleass add support for at least arm6 and arm7, so it can run on small edge devices like raspberry pi.

You can also add a link to your project to blocky's documentation.

[GabeDuarteM]

Thank you for the early feedback!

About the rpi builds, it should work with raspberry pi 4 and up (I'm using it on my rpi 4). For arm6 and arm7 (I assume for rpi 3 and older), seems like I unfortunately can't build nextjs on those platforms due to lightningcss (a nextjs' dependency) not working on them. I can try to better investigate it further later today to see if theres any workaround

[GabeDuarteM]

I asked on their repo and it seems like they don't support it due to low usage and increased overhead...

In any case, I managed to do some dark sorcery with docker and built it on arm64 and reused its assets on the other platforms. Seems to work for amd64 and arm64, but unfortunately I can't test it on armv6/v7, so I'm just hoping it also works there 😅