Block ads and trackers on every device in your house, including the smart TV
One news homepage contacts 31 servers before you've read a word, and 18 of them are ads and trackers. AdGuard Home blocks those for every device in the house: phones, laptops, consoles and the smart TV you can't install anything on. Test-drive it on your PC in 15 minutes, then move it to a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop and point your router at it.
- Your whole house switched over: an always-on box, a fixed address, one phone tested, then the router
- A Windows PC, Mac or Linux machine for the test drive
- About 50MB of free disk space
- For the whole house later: a machine that's always on (a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop) and the login for your router
- The terminal basics from Level 0: opening PowerShell and pasting a command (Terminal survival kit)
Download AdGuard Home and start it
A private test drive first: it runs on your PC only, and nothing else on your network can see it yet.
Every time a phone opens a website, or a TV app talks to a server, it first asks a DNS server: "what's the address for doubleclick.net?" AdGuard Home is a DNS server you run yourself. Normal sites get their real address. Ad and tracker servers get 0.0.0.0, which means "nowhere", so the ad never loads. Because it works at that level, it covers devices you can't install a blocker on, like a smart TV.
It's free and open source, from the official GitHub page ↗. Open PowerShell and paste these lines:
Windows (PowerShell)cd $HOME\Downloads Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/releases/latest/download/AdGuardHome_windows_amd64.zip -OutFile AdGuardHome.zip Expand-Archive AdGuardHome.zip -DestinationPath . cd AdGuardHome .\AdGuardHome.exe --no-permcheck --web-addr 127.0.0.1:3000That's an 11MB download. There's no installer: the zip holds one 33MB program.
--web-addr 127.0.0.1:3000puts the setup page on this PC only.On a Mac or Linux, use AdGuard's official install script. It asks for your password (port 53 needs admin rights there) and runs AdGuard Home in the background; on a Mac it lives in
/Applications/AdGuardHome. Then open the setup page athttp://127.0.0.1:3000:Mac or Linux (from the official README)curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/master/scripts/install.sh | sh -s -- -vCarefulAlways start it with--no-permcheckon Windows. Without it, AdGuard Home locks its own folder to Administrators only, the blocklist can't save, and nothing gets blocked. AdGuard's release notes say the option exists because that check "caused issues on Windows".Output2026/10/09 03:36:03.405026 [info] starting adguard home version="AdGuard Home, version v0.107.79" 2026/10/09 03:36:03.407139 [info] this is the first time adguard home has been launched 2026/10/09 03:36:03.407139 [info] checking if adguard home has the necessary permissions 2026/10/09 03:36:03.508919 [info] adguard home can bind to port 53 ... 2026/10/09 03:36:03.548838 [info] webapi: This is the first launch of AdGuard Home, redirecting everything to /install.htmlOn Windows, leave this window open: AdGuard Home runs for as long as it stays open, and Ctrl + C stops it. On a Mac or Linux it keeps running in the background until you uninstall it (see the undo section).
http://127.0.0.1:3000 shows the setup page).If it breaks"Access is denied", or it quits with "failed to parse configuration file" + 1 more
"Access is denied", or it quits with "failed to parse configuration file"
--no-permcheck, and it locked its own files. Close it, give the files back to yourself with icacls "$HOME\Downloads\AdGuardHome\*" /reset /T /C /Q, then start it again with the full command above.Expand-Archive says the folder already exists
cd AdGuardHome), or delete the old AdGuardHome folder first.