Block List

A minimalist hosts-based tool for managing block lists and ad-blocking.

This project uses the excellent and regularly updated Unified Hosts lists from Steven Black.

Why should you use Block List?

• It is an extensible, small and simple tool; consisting of only fifty-five lines of code!
• It will block this traffic across all programs running on the system.
• It is written in Rust and hence can be depended upon to be fast and stable.
• It is designed to be easily incorporated into shell scripts to automate or customize its behaviour to your liking.
• A hosts-based block list such as this uses minimal system resources to block unwanted traffic in comparison to a browser extension.

Installation

Using Cargo (Rust)

cargo install block-list

More options will come in future!

Usage

Just use 'hosts' as the desired list if you only want ad-blocking.

sudo block-list /path/to/hosts your-desired-list

Examples

Basic usage:

sudo block-list /etc/hosts social

Pipe in a custom list:

cat someFile.txt | sudo block-list /etc/hosts

OR

cat someFile.txt | sudo block-list /etc/hosts social

Automatically update Block List at 10pm:

Open the root user's crontab file

sudo crontab -e

Then add the following line

0 22 * * * block-list /etc/hosts hosts

Use Block List to re-route a url to a different address:

Find the address using dig

dig duckduckgo.com

Coppy the IP address listed in 'Answer Section' to a file

# A custom Block List

# Re-route all requests from Google to DuckDuckGo
52.142.124.215 www.google.com
52.142.124.215 google.com

Pipe in the custom list to Block List

cat someFile.txt | sudo block-list /etc/hosts

Output

If successful, this command will append a new list or replace the current list at the tail of the supplied hosts file, eg:

Block List updated! 🔒

##
# Host Database
##
127.0.0.1	localhost
255.255.255.255	broadcasthost
::1             localhost


# Your list of addresses
1.2.3.4 somehost

... 

# Block List

0.0.0.0 some.custom.address.net
0.0.0.0 another.custom.address.xyz

0.0.0.0 some.malware.address.com
0.0.0.0 another.blocked.address.xxx