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Group management

Group management

Any blocklist or domain on the white-/black-/regex-lists can be managed through groups. This allows not only grouping them to highlight their relationship, but also enabling/disabling them together if one, for instance, wants to visit a specific service only temporarily.

Groups are defined in the group table and can have an optional description in addition to the mandatory name of the group.

Label Type Uniqueness enforced Content
id integer Yes Unique ID for database operations
enabled boolean No Flag whether domains in this group should be used
(0 = disabled, 1 = enabled)
name text Yes Mandatory group name
description text No Optional field for arbitrary user comments

Group management is implemented using so-called linking tables. Hence, it is possible to

  • associate domains (and clients!) with any number of groups,
  • manage adlists together with groups,
  • use the same groups for black- and whitelisted domains at the same time.

The linking tables are particularly simple, as they only link group ids with list ids. As an example, we describe the domainlist_by_group table. The adlist and client linking tables are constructed similarly.

Label Type Content
domainlist_id integer id of domain in the domainlist table
group_id integer id of associated group in the group table

Group Default (group_id 0) is special as it is automatically assigned to domains and clients not being a member of other groups. Each newly added client or domain gets assigned to group zero when being added.

Effect of group management

The great flexibility to manage domains in no, one, or multiple groups may result in unexpected behavior when, e.g., the domains are enabled in some but disabled in other groups. For the sake of convenience, we describe the possible configurations and whether FTLDNS uses these domains (✔) or not (✘) in such cases.

  • Domain disabled: ✘
    Note that the domain is never imported by FTLDNS, even if it is contained in an enabled group.

  • Domain enabled: It depends...

    • Not managed by a group: ✔
    • Contained in one or more groups (at least one enabled): ✔
    • Contained in one or more groups (all disabled): ✘

Last update: November 4, 2020
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