pihole-ctl

What This Skill Does

The pihole-ctl skill is a robust utility designed to integrate OpenClaw with your local Pi-hole network-wide ad blocker. Acting as a "Network Guardian," this skill allows the AI agent to interface directly with the Pi-hole FTL engine to retrieve real-time data or perform system administration tasks. By utilizing native Python scripts to query the FTL SQLite database, the skill provides deep insights into your network traffic, identifying top-blocked domains, high-frequency clients, and general blocking statistics. Furthermore, it bridges the gap between natural language commands and the Pi-hole command-line interface, enabling the agent to execute maintenance routines like gravity updates or service toggles without manual intervention.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/1999azzar/pihole-ctl. Post-installation, ensure your system user possesses the necessary read permissions for the /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db file. We highly recommend adding your agent's execution user to the pihole group using sudo usermod -aG pihole <username> to avoid permission errors when querying logs. For management commands that require administrative privileges, configure your sudoers file to allow passwordless execution for specific pihole commands.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for home lab enthusiasts and network administrators looking to automate their dashboard monitoring. It shines when you need to audit suspicious activity on your network, quickly disable ad-blocking for a specific site that is failing to load, or monitor the effectiveness of your blocklists over time. By centralizing these tasks within the AI agent, you gain a conversational interface for your network infrastructure.

Example Prompts

• "How many ads has Pi-hole blocked in the last 24 hours?"
• "I'm having trouble with a website, please disable Pi-hole blocking for 5 minutes."
• "Who are the top three clients requesting domains on my network right now?"

Tips & Limitations

• Permissions: Always verify that the database path is correct for your specific OS distribution, as some configurations might vary.
• Performance: While querying the FTL database is efficient, avoid running excessively frequent queries if you have a massive network with heavy traffic to prevent potential database locking.
• Security: Since this skill requires sudo for management commands, ensure the agent has limited sudoers privileges, specifically restricting access to only the necessary pihole commands to maintain a secure environment.