macos-blackhole

What is this?

A simple bash script I use on my MacBook. When run the script will:

• Download and install the simple hosts file manager Gas Mask
• Download StevenBlack's well-curated host files to load within Gas Mask
• If Gas Mask is already installed, the host files will be updated to the latest versions

How do I run it?

Either

git clone https://github.com/TheDen/macos-blackhole
./macos-blackhole/macos-blackhole.sh

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheDen/macos-blackhole/master/macos-blackhole.sh -o macos-blackhole.sh
chmod +x macos-blackhole.sh
./macos-blackhole.sh

Or live dangerously and pipe the script to bash

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheDen/macos-blackhole/master/macos-blackhole.sh | bash

Why not just use pi-hole?

I love pi-hole, but sometimes pi-hole can't be deployed on networks where the the user is not an admin (or on untrusted networks). This allows mobility with respect to host blocking.

Contributions and Caveats

Room for improvement and considerations for PRs:

• Currently it's set up to only download two host files from SteveBlack's repo. Personally these are the two I mainly use, though the script could be updated to download them all
• Even though this is a personal script, I attempted to make it portable, deps are builtins, bash (avoiding v4 bashisms), curl, unzip, and shasum. So it's not guaranteed to work on your machine (but most likely will).
• The script ought to be formatted with shfmt -i 2 -ci -sr (https://github.com/mvdan/sh) and the script must pass shellcheck (could potentially add a CI)
• A nice way to run the script on schedule in MacOS? crontab?
• There is inherit hackyness in this setup, but it's quick and works for me

What is MacOS's default host file?

127.0.0.1	localhost
255.255.255.255	broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0	localhost