Hosts Updater

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

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

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

This script download lists of malicious domains from following websites:

• http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt
• http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
• http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts
• http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/serverlist.php?hostformat=hosts&mimetype=plaintext

Unique entries from those lists are added together, and results are combined with your current hosts file (no data will be lost as original hosts file is copied and reused in the future).

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 only takes couple seconds after file change, and besides that has nearly zero impact on performance. Additionally AdBlock is removing parts of websites very aggressively, often leaving broken layout - it should be less common problem with domain blacklisting.

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

As a lot of hosts are added to your system, autocomplete might slow down. To solve this in zsh prezto one could replace cat /etc/hosts (|)(N) with sed /0\.0\.0\.0/d. This prevents the domains to be loaded for completion.

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 domains that you want to access 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.

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

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

If you like my work then consider supporting me:

MIT License

Copyright © 2014 Bernard Potocki