Last week I bought a Raspberry Pi Zero W so that I could set up a Pi-hole on my home network. If you don’t know what Pi-hole is: it’s a network-level ad and tracking script blocker. It’s different from using something like AdBlock or the Brave browser, because it works across all devices on your network automatically. Scripts and ads are blocked before the request can even be made, so in some cases it can really speed up your web browsing.

After getting it going and seeing the nifty admin panel that shows you query stats, I realized I would really like to see those query stats very easily on my Mac. Long story short, I ended up building the app I envisioned, and even added some extra features I hadn’t planned on originally, like multiple Pi-hole support and the ability to toggle your Pi-hole(s) on and off as you please.

PiBar is free open source software (FOSS) like everything else I’ve built, so you can grab it over on the PiBar GitHub repo. It’s also available on the App Store, if you want to show your support (and get automatic updates): Purchase PiBar on the App Store.

I’ll be writing a WIUT post tomorrow about my development process for PiBar over the past week, so you can look forward to that, if you need something to look forward to. (If my post tomorrow is all you have to look forward to, reach out to me and we can get you the help you need. You’re not alone, we can get through this together.)