Update Pi-hole

Even after freeing up some space on my ancient Raspberry Pi, I was unable to update my Pi-hole installation. Here are notes on how I was able to get past that and install the latest version.

If you do not care to read (or about) all the words and explanations, feel free to skip to the SHORT VERSION

BACKGROUND

As I noted previously, I have an ancient Raspberry Pi which I am using solely as a network wide ad blocker with Pi-hole. It works well enough, but I haven’t updated it in a long time. I naively thought it’d get updated when I updated DietPi but that didn’t happen.

CHALLENGE

Come to find out, you cannot update via DietPi and you cannot update via the web interface. All the instructions I found indicated that you must run pihole -up in order to do the update. I don’t know if it was because I had fallen so far behind or what, but that did not work for me. Luckily the error told me exactly what to do next:

root@DietPi:~# pihole -up

  Error: Core Pi-hole repo is missing from system!
  Please re-run install script from https://pi-hole.net
root@DietPi:~#

I can’t say that I totally understand what repo is missing. But I researched more and determined I simply needed to run the install script remotely. Luckily it was smart enough to realize it was actually an update (saving all my settings, which is nice). BUT, it also failed with the following, unhelpful message:

root@DietPi:~# curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
...<snip>...
  [✓] Check for existing repository in /var/www/html/admin
  [i] Update repo in /var/www/html/admin...
  : Could not update local repository. Contact support.
root@DietPi:~#

I wasn’t going to contact support…

SOLUTION

I realize only in hindsight that the error was more helpful than I thought. It is telling me which repo it was trying to update. I don’t fully understand how Pi-hole works, nor the installer, but I looked in that /var/www/html/admin directory and found that it was pointing to a git repo. I’m not a pro at using git, but running git reset --hard allowed me to move forward:

root@DietPi:~# cd /var/www/html/admin
root@DietPi:/var/www/html/admin# git remote -v
origin	https://github.com/pi-hole/AdminLTE.git (fetch)
origin	https://github.com/pi-hole/AdminLTE.git (push)
root@DietPi:/var/www/html/admin# git reset --hard
HEAD is now at af8c926c Merge pull request #795 from pi-hole/release/v4.0
root@DietPi:~# cd
root@DietPi:~# curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
...<snip>...

  [i] The install log is located at: /etc/pihole/install.log
Update Complete! 

  Current Pi-hole version is v4.2.1
  Current AdminLTE version is v4.2
  Current FTL version is v4.2.1
root@DietPi:~# 

NEXT STEPS

• I should probably explore how to better utilize the ad blocker but I’m currently just using all default settings. I know you can import other and additional blacklists, but I’m not yet

SIDE NOTES

• I do not log into this thing very often, which is part of the reason this was never addressed previously. That’s the point of treating it as an appliance, right?!
• As I mentioned, I’m not git pro so I don’t fully know the effect of resetting the head as I did. I also wonder if I should have tried to git pull first?

WHAT I LEARNED

• sometimes working with a black-box appliance is harder than it should be

REFERENCE

• I found a discussion that recommended the reset (along with checking network connectivity and /etc/resolv.conf) but I have lost the page…sorry author of other posts

SHORT VERSION

To avoid tl;dr enjoy this instead:

root@DietPi:~# cd /var/www/html/admin
root@DietPi:/var/www/html/admin# git reset --hard
HEAD is now at af8c926c Merge pull request #795 from pi-hole/release/v4.0
root@DietPi:~# cd
root@DietPi:~# curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

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