mosaic

Block List

A minimalist hosts-based tool for managing block lists and ad-blocking.

This project uses the excellent and regularly updated Unified Hosts lists from Steven Black.

It is an extensible, small and simple tool; consisting of only fifty-five lines of code!
It will block this traffic across all programs running on the system.
It is written in Rust and hence can be depended upon to be fast and stable.
It is designed to be easily incorporated into shell scripts to automate or customize its behaviour to your liking.
A hosts-based block list such as this uses minimal system resources to block unwanted traffic in comparison to a browser extension.

Using Cargo (Rust)

shell cargo install block-list

More options will come in future!

Just use 'hosts' as the desired list if you only want ad-blocking.

shell sudo block-list /path/to/hosts your-desired-list

Basic usage:

shell sudo block-list /etc/hosts social

Pipe in a custom list:

shell cat someFile.txt | sudo block-list /etc/hosts

shell cat someFile.txt | sudo block-list /etc/hosts social

Automatically update Block List at 10pm:

Open the root user's crontab file

shell sudo crontab -e

Then add the following line

txt 0 22 * * * block-list /etc/hosts hosts

Use Block List to re-route a url to a different address:

Find the address using dig

shell dig duckduckgo.com

Coppy the IP address listed in 'Answer Section' to a file

```txt

A custom Block List

52.142.124.215 www.google.com 52.142.124.215 google.com ```

Pipe in the custom list to Block List

shell cat someFile.txt | sudo block-list /etc/hosts

If successful, this command will append a new list or replace the current list at the tail of the supplied hosts file, eg:

shell Block List updated! 🔒

```txt

127.0.0.1 localhost 255.255.255.255 broadcasthost ::1 localhost

1.2.3.4 somehost

...

0.0.0.0 some.custom.address.net 0.0.0.0 another.custom.address.xyz

0.0.0.0 some.malware.address.com 0.0.0.0 another.blocked.address.xxx ```