Hosts Updater

This script indends to help manage large collection of blacklisted domains. It's best to describe it as replacement for adblock, but instead of slowing down your browser it blocks domains of ad and scam websites at DNS level.

Quick start guide

$ gem install hosts_updater
$ sudo hosts-updater --help

It required sudo in order to write to /etc/hosts file.

What it does?

This script download lists of malicious domains from following websites:

All of those lists are combined, duplicates removed and combined with your current hosts file (no data will should lost as original hosts file is copied and reused in future).

How is it better than AdBlock/Ghostery etc?

Each browser plugin that blocks ads is using large amount of resources, hogs browser, and often causes strange errors. In constrast to this blacklisting domains in /etc/hosts takes couple seconds after file change, but after that has nearly zero impact on performance. Additionally AdBlock is removing parts of websited very aggresively, often leaving indended layout broken - it should be less common problem with domain blacklisting.

On the other hand there are small amount of ads that are unblockable by domain blacklisting - that are visible from time to time, but probably not often enough to complain ;)

How to configure what domains I want whitelisted/blacklisted?

During first run hosts-updater will create folder in /etc/hosts.d, in which it will store all configuration files:

hosts.custom - this will be copy of old /etc/hosts and it will be added to /etc/hosts at top upon each use of hosts-updater. You should store you developer domains and all similar stuff inside of this file, as it will never be modified by this script. If you need to blacklist additional domains you should put them here too.
hosts.auto - this will be regenerated upon calling hosts-updater with --update flag. It stores downloaded blacklists and is used to regenerate /etc/hosts. It's good idea to refresh it from time to time.
hosts.whitelist - in this file you can place domain that you want to have access to despite figuring in one of downloaded lists. In order to do so simply paste full domain name inside there (one domain per line) and it will be picked up during next hosts-updater run.

Any other configuration options?

See hosts-updater --help for more configuration options.

Are you owner of those blacklists?

No - I'm just using them with proper attribution. All kudos and suggestions should be sent to maintainers of appropriate lists.

License

MIT License