A few months ago I went on a quest for a DNS server and was dissatisfied with current maintained projects. They were either good at adblocking (Blocky, grimd…) or good at specifying custom DNS (CoreDNS…).

So I forked grimd and embarked on rewriting a good chunk of it for it to address my needs - the result is leng.

  • it is fast
  • it is small
  • it is easy
  • you can specify blocklists and it will fetch them for you
  • you can specify custom DNS records with proper zone file syntax (SRV records, etc)
  • it supports DNS-over-HTTPS so you can stay private
  • it is well-documented
  • can be deployed on systemd, docker, or Nix

I have been running it as my nameserver in a Nomad cluster since! I plan to keep maintaining and improving it, so feel free to give it a try if it also fulfils your needs

  • NicoOP
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    121 year ago

    I am working on adding a feature comparison to the docs. But in the meantime: leng has less features (like no web UI, no DHCP server) which means it is lighter (50MB RAM vs 150MB for adguard, 512MB for pihole), and easier to reproducibly configure because it is stateless (no web UI settings).

    I believe blocky and coredns are better comparisons for leng than “tries to achieve it all” solutions like adguard, pihole…