sidingsmedia/pixelserv-tls-pihole

A tiny bespoke HTTP/1.1 server for adblock and accelerating web browsing.

pixelserv-tls is a tiny bespoke HTTP/1.1 webserver with HTTPS and SNI support. It acts on behalf of hundreds of thousands of advert/tracker servers and responds to all requests with nothing to speed up web browsing.

pixelserv-tls supports TLSv1.0, TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3 and thus could operate with a wide range of browsers and client devices. Server certificates for any given advert/tracker domains are generated automatically on first use and saved to disk.

pixelserv-tls can log access and HTTP/1.1 POST contents to syslog. So it is also a useful tool to inspect and expose 'wrongly blocked' domains as well as 'rogue' domains invading user privacy.

This fork of pixelserv-tls redirects all HTTPS traffic to HTTP which means that the Pi-Hole blocking page can be used instead of a blank screen.

Build from source

This works on all Linux distributions and Linux-like environments such Homebrew for macOS and Cygwin for Windows.

autoreconf -i
./configure
make install

Launch pixelserv-tls

pixelserv-tls <listening ip>

Check out the man page for customization and command line options.

Creating a service

In order to get pixelsrv-tls to run constantly on Linux you will need to create a service. An example of a service file can be found below. This has been tested on Debian 10. You may need to modify it to suit your distribution.

Filename: pixelsrv-tls.service

[Unit]
Description=A tiny bespoke webserver for adblock with HTTP/1.1 and HTTPS support
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/pixelserv-tls 192.168.1.2 -p 8080 -l 1 -z /var/cache/pixelserv -f
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

After creating this file in /etc/systemd/system or whereever your service files are stored, you will be able to start and stop your pixelsrv-tls server like any other service with commands like systemctl start pixelsrv-tls.service or systemctl stop pixelsrv-tls.service.