Pi-hole

Pi-hole is an open source network-wide DNS sinkhole that blocks ads, tracking, and unwanted domains across all devices on a local network without requiring per-device software. It runs on lightweight hardware such as Raspberry Pi and offers a web admin interface plus a REST API (introduced in v6 via the pihole-FTL binary) for programmatic management of blocklists, allowlists, groups, clients, DNS settings, and live query logs.

Pi-hole publishes 4 API contracts indexed on the APIs.io network, including Auth API, DNS API, Groups API, and 1 more. Tagged areas include DNS, Ad Blocking, Network Security, Privacy, and Open Source.

The Pi-hole catalog on APIs.io includes 1 Spectral governance ruleset.

Pi-hole’s developer surface includes authentication, documentation, engineering blog, and 9 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

22.3/100 emerging ▬ flat Agent 19/100 agent aware Front door AI 1/6 silent Heartbeat 100/100 alive Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-11-13 · rubric v0.28.0 · Show this score on your site →

1 published contract

DNS Ad Blocking Network Security Privacy Open Source Self-Hosted

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-11-13 · rubric v0.28.0

Composite quality — 22.3/100 · emerging

Contract Quality 8.0 / 19

Developer Ergonomics 3.6 / 15

Access Clarity 0.0 / 15

Operational Transparency 0.5 / 10

Contract Governance 1.2 / 9

Discoverability 5.0 / 8

Regulatory Posture 0.9 / 15

Create-or-Update Ergonomics 0.0 / 10

Agent readiness — 19/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 10 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Pagination 5 / 5

Distinct Operations 3 / 3

MCP Tool Quality 6 / 6

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Horizontal (data, software, accessibility, platform) regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created. Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet, not penalised by it.

The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 25. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

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Agent readiness — checks not met, largest first (exact, from this profile):

MCP Server +12 pts — deployment.mode + probe verdict on the mcp/ manifest, not the pointer; an unprobed slug falls back to authorship Ask about this →
Idempotency +9 pts — OpenAPI mutating operations declare an idempotency key — a header, a request-body property, or a named de-duplication token whose own description says so (verified); else common[].type matches /idempoten/i (documented) Ask about this →
Stable Error Semantics +8 pts — OpenAPI $refs a shared error schema across 4xx/5xx responses (verified), else common[].type includes ErrorCatalog / ErrorCodes / DeclineCodes Ask about this →
A2A Agent Card +8 pts — a2a/-a2a.yml manifest, graded on conformance.grade against A2A 1.0.0 Ask about this →
Rate-Limit Signaling +7 pts — OpenAPI responses document X-RateLimit-* / RateLimit headers (verified), else a rate_limits artifact or RateLimits link (documented) Ask about this →
Request/Response Examples +7 pts — share of operations carrying request/response examples; else an Examples / Code Samples link Ask about this →

10 more unmet checks in the Agent Readiness table above.

Kin Score — facets with the most composite points still available (weight × headroom):

Access Clarity scores 0.0 — up to +20.0 composite points Ask about this →
Developer Ergonomics scores 23.8 — up to +15.2 composite points Ask about this →
Contract Quality scores 42.9 — up to +14.3 composite points Ask about this →

Each check links to what satisfies it. Publish the artifact, or tell us where it already lives, and the score moves on the next scoring run.

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Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from the provider profile at artifacts.apis.io/pi-hole/apis.yml: open an issue on github.com/api-evangelist/pi-hole to ask a question or point us at an artifact you publish. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Standards implemented 2

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

DNS

tagged — the provider's own APIs.json carries the standard as a tag; implementation not verified

OpenAPI

measured — observed by APIs.io (published)

APIs 4

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Pi-hole Auth API

Session authentication.

Pi-hole DNS API

DNS blocking configuration.

Pi-hole Groups API

Manage DNS blocking groups.

Pi-hole Info API

Pi-hole instance information.

Open Collections 5

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Pi-hole REST Auth API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pi-hole REST Auth DNS API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pi-hole REST Auth Groups API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pi-hole REST Auth Info API

OPEN COLLECTION

Pi-hole REST API

OPEN COLLECTION

Spectral Rules 1

Spectral governance rulesets for linting and validating these APIs. Counts are the severity each rule declares, not results of running them.

Pi-hole API Rules

49 rules · 47 error-severity 1 warn-severity 1 info-severity

SPECTRAL

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Pi-hole Authentication

apiKey · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Pi-hole Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access (API Evangelist recommendations) 1

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Pi-hole Agentic Access

7 operations · 4 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Documentation 1

Reference material describing how the API behaves

Documentation

Documentation

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

AgenticAccess

AgenticAccess

Build 2

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHubOrganization

GitHubOrganization

Source Code

Source Code

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Authentication

Authentication

Learn 1

Tutorials, courses, talks, and written guidance

Discourse Forum

Discourse Forum

Company 3

The organization behind the API

LinkedIn

Website

Website

Blog

Blog

Other 2

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

FTL Source

FTL Source

Donate

Donate

Source (apis.yml)

aid: pi-hole
name: Pi-hole
description: Pi-hole is an open source network-wide DNS sinkhole that blocks ads, tracking, and unwanted domains across all
  devices on a local network without requiring per-device software. It runs on lightweight hardware such as Raspberry Pi and
  offers a web admin interface plus a REST API (introduced in v6 via the pihole-FTL binary) for programmatic management of
  blocklists, allowlists, groups, clients, DNS settings, and live query logs.
type: Index
deliveryModel:
  model: unknown
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: false
  label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
  confidence: low
  source:
  - openapi
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source:
  - authentication
  - security
  generated: '2026-11-13'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/pi-hole.png
x-docs-platform: mkdocs
x-docs-platform-confidence: medium
x-docs-platform-checked: 2026-10-04
x-docs-hosting: netlify
tags:
- DNS
- Ad Blocking
- Network Security
- Privacy
- Open Source
- Self-Hosted
tags_raw:
- DNS
- Ad Blocking
- Network Security
- Privacy
- Open Source
- Self-Hosted
- Open-Source
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/pi-hole/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
created: '2026-05-11'
modified: '2026-05-11'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis:
- aid: pi-hole:pi-hole-auth-api
  name: Pi-hole Auth API
  description: Session authentication.
  humanURL: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/
  baseURL: http://pi.hole/api
  tags:
  - Authentication
  tags_raw:
  - Auth
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/pi-hole-auth-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/
  - type: Authentication
    url: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/auth/
- aid: pi-hole:pi-hole-dns-api
  name: Pi-hole DNS API
  description: DNS blocking configuration.
  humanURL: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/
  baseURL: http://pi.hole/api
  tags:
  - DNS
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/pi-hole-dns-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/
  - type: Authentication
    url: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/auth/
- aid: pi-hole:pi-hole-groups-api
  name: Pi-hole Groups API
  description: Manage DNS blocking groups.
  humanURL: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/
  baseURL: http://pi.hole/api
  tags:
  - Group
  tags_raw:
  - Groups
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/pi-hole-groups-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/
  - type: Authentication
    url: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/auth/
- aid: pi-hole:pi-hole-info-api
  name: Pi-hole Info API
  description: Pi-hole instance information.
  humanURL: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/
  baseURL: http://pi.hole/api
  tags:
  - Info
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/pi-hole-info-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/
  - type: Authentication
    url: https://docs.pi-hole.net/api/auth/
common:
- type: AgenticAccess
  url: agentic-access/pi-hole-agentic-access.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/pi-hole-domain-security.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/pi-hole-authentication.yml
- type: LinkedIn
  url: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-pi-hole
- type: Website
  url: https://pi-hole.net
- type: Documentation
  url: https://docs.pi-hole.net
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/pi-hole
- type: Source Code
  url: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole
- type: FTL Source
  url: https://github.com/pi-hole/FTL
- type: Discourse Forum
  url: https://discourse.pi-hole.net
- type: Donate
  url: https://pi-hole.net/donate/
- type: Blog
  url: https://pi-hole.net/blog/
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com

Pi-hole API — frequently asked questions

Does Pi-hole have an API?

Yes. APIs.io lists 4 APIs from Pi-hole, including Pi-hole Auth API, Pi-hole DNS API and Pi-hole Groups API, and 1 more.

Is there an OpenAPI specification for the Pi-hole API?

Yes. APIs.io indexes 4 OpenAPI specifications for Pi-hole, each linked for download from this page.

How do I authenticate with the Pi-hole API?

Pi-hole uses bearer-token authentication (apiKey · 1 scheme). The details are profiled on APIs.io as Pi-hole Authentication.

Is the Pi-hole API ready for AI agents?

Pi-hole has a Kin Score of 22.3 out of 100 (emerging) and an Agent Readiness score of 19.0 (agent-aware), scored by API Evangelist on 2026-11-13.

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