hosts
Name
hosts - enables serving zone data from a /etc/hosts
style file.
Description
The hosts plugin is useful for serving zones from a /etc/hosts
file. It serves from a preloaded
file that exists on disk. It checks the file for changes and updates the zones accordingly. This
plugin only supports A, AAAA, and PTR records. The hosts plugin can be used with readily
available hosts files that block access to advertising servers.
The plugin reloads the content of the hosts file every 5 seconds. Upon reload, CoreDNS will use the
new definitions. Should the file be deleted, any inlined content will continue to be served. When
the file is restored, it will then again be used.
If you want to pass the request to the rest of the plugin chain if there is no match in the hosts
plugin, you must specify the fallthrough
option.
This plugin can only be used once per Server Block.
The hosts file
Commonly the entries are of the form IP_address canonical_hostname [aliases...]
as explained by
the hosts(5) man page.
Examples:
# The following lines are desirable for IPv4 capable hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.1.10 example.com example
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fdfc:a744:27b5:3b0e::1 example.com example
PTR records
PTR records for reverse lookups are generated automatically by CoreDNS (based on the hosts file
entries) and cannot be created manually.
Syntax
hosts [FILE [ZONES...]] {
[INLINE]
ttl SECONDS
no_reverse
reload DURATION
fallthrough [ZONES...]
}
- FILE the hosts file to read and parse. If the path is relative the path from the root
plugin will be prepended to it. Defaults to /etc/hosts if omitted. We scan the file for changes
every 5 seconds.
- ZONES zones it should be authoritative for. If empty, the zones from the configuration block
are used.
- INLINE the hosts file contents inlined in Corefile. If there are any lines before fallthrough
then all of them will be treated as the additional content for hosts file. The specified hosts
file path will still be read but entries will be overridden.
ttl
change the DNS TTL of the records generated (forward and reverse). The default is 3600 seconds (1 hour).
reload
change the period between each hostsfile reload. A time of zero seconds disables the
feature. Examples of valid durations: "300ms", "1.5h" or "2h45m". See Go's
time. package.
no_reverse
disable the automatic generation of the in-addr.arpa
or ip6.arpa
entries for the hosts
fallthrough
If zone matches and no record can be generated, pass request to the next plugin.
If [ZONES...] is omitted, then fallthrough happens for all zones for which the plugin
is authoritative. If specific zones are listed (for example in-addr.arpa
and ip6.arpa
), then only
queries for those zones will be subject to fallthrough.
Metrics
If monitoring is enabled (via the prometheus plugin) then the following metrics are exported:
coredns_hosts_entries{}
- The combined number of entries in hosts and Corefile.
coredns_hosts_reload_timestamp_seconds{}
- The timestamp of the last reload of hosts file.
Examples
Load /etc/hosts
file.
. {
hosts
}
Load example.hosts
file in the current directory.
. {
hosts example.hosts
}
Load example.hosts file and only serve example.org and example.net from it and fall through to the
next plugin if query doesn't match.
. {
hosts example.hosts example.org example.net {
fallthrough
}
}
Load hosts file inlined in Corefile.
example.hosts example.org {
hosts {
10.0.0.1 example.org
fallthrough
}
whoami
}
See also
The form of the entries in the /etc/hosts
file are based on IETF RFC 952 which was updated by IETF RFC 1123.