nxdns/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to nxdns are recorded here. The format follows Keep a Changelog, and the project uses Semantic Versioning.

Sections are written by hand. Nothing here is generated from commit messages: the point of the file is to say what changed for an operator, which a commit subject rarely does.

[Unreleased]

[0.0.3] - 2026-08-15

Devices name themselves: the clients table asks the router over reverse DNS instead of waiting for the operator to type every name. The CI container gate also moved from workflow shell into a compiled, tested tool, which fixed a latent temp-directory bug shared with the release tool.

Added

• Client names learned over reverse DNS. A client row that carries no hand-typed name gets one from the network: each tracker flush pass takes up to 16 unnamed rows, builds each address's reverse name, matches it against the declared forward_zones, and on a match sends one PTR query to that zone's resolver, storing the answer as a learned name. This requires a conditional forward zone covering the LAN's reverse space — for example 168.192.in-addr.arpa pointed at the router; without one, nothing is sent anywhere. A hand-typed name always wins, learned names never appear in nxdns export and are never set by nxdns import, and each row refreshes once a day (an hour after a failure), so a rename can show stale for up to 24 hours. The API's Client object gains a learned_name field and the clients page shows it.

Changed

• The container CI gate — image build, image-contents assertion against the packaged artifacts, and the startup/shutdown smoke test — moved from workflow shell into tools/container_check.zig, compiled and unit-tested by zig build test and runnable on a laptop against a local docker daemon. The health probe now runs under a real 60-second deadline (the shell loop's "30 seconds" could stretch past three minutes), and the gate's docker objects carry an ownership label so anything a dead runner leaks is discoverable. The version in CI is parsed from build.zig.zon through the zon grammar, once, instead of by two copies of a sed regex.

Fixed

• The release tool's temporary-directory claim was not exclusive: the "create" it relied on succeeds on a directory that already exists, so a stale or concurrent directory could be silently adopted, written into, and deleted on exit. Both the release tool and the new container gate now claim their directories exclusively and retry on collision.

[0.0.2] - 2026-08-14

Configuration can now be a file that every boot converges to, filtering gains regex rules and honors blocklist exception lines, and two refresh bugs that silently kept stale state are fixed. Note the three breaking changes below if you script against nxdns import or run with --config.

Added

• Declarative configuration for IaC. nxdns run --config=<file> makes the file the sole source of configuration: every boot converges the database to it in one transaction, preserving blocklist downloads, compiled lists and client history, so an unchanged file costs zero downloads and zero writes. Bare nxdns run keeps the database (and the web UI) in charge, exactly as before. In file mode the web UI is read-only for configuration and says so; runtime actions (pause, blocklist refresh, certificate reload) stay live. GET /api/settings reports which authority governs the process.
• nxdns import now refuses a file whose application would delete configuration rows, names the tables and counts, and applies it only with the new --allow-delete flag. Additive and edit-in-place imports need no flag.
• Regex rules. Rules gain a third kind, regex, beside exact and wildcard, for per-group allow and block patterns such as ^ad[0-9]+-. The engine is homegrown and linear-time by construction, so no pattern can make matching blow up; backreferences and lookaround do not exist, and a bad pattern is refused at insert time with the limit it hit. Matches appear in /api/lookup and the query log as rule_allow_regex / rule_block_regex. Regex still comes only from you: regex lines in downloaded lists stay counted and skipped.
• Blocklist exception lines are honored. An Adblock-Plus @@||name^ line in a downloaded list now lifts that name — and its subdomains — out of what the attached lists block. Exceptions sit below every rule you wrote: a downloaded list can reopen only a hole another downloaded list dug, never override an operator decision. Each source reports how many it carried.
• Browser-only lines are counted where you can see them. Every source now reports how many of its lines nxdns skipped as syntax with no DNS meaning — cosmetic filters, $-modifier rules — beside the existing skipped-regex count. Both blocklist tables show the number and the UI explains the difference: a list whose skipped-unsupported count dwarfs its domain count is written for browser extensions, and its DNS or hosts variant will block more. Previously such a list compiled to almost nothing and looked clean.

Changed

• Breaking: nxdns run --config <file> changed meaning. It used to seed the database once and then ignore the file; it now makes the file the authority on every boot, which deletes any configuration the file does not declare — including edits made through the web UI since the seed. Before upgrading a unit that carries --config: either drop the flag to keep the database in charge, or adopt file mode with the sequence in the upgrade guide. Order matters there: export the file with the NEW binary (stopped).
• Breaking: 0.0.1 exports are refused by this version. A 0.0.1 nxdns export writes both .password = "" and the stored .password_hash, and this version refuses a file that carries both. This bites any old export — an adoption file or a configuration backup fed to nxdns import alike. Fix an existing export by deleting its .password = "" line (keep the .password_hash line). Take fresh backups with the new binary.
• Breaking: the offline password-change recipe changed. Setting .password = "new" together with .password_hash = "" is now refused (empty password_hash is an explicit "disable authentication", and the two fields cannot both be present). To change the password in the file: set .password and delete the .password_hash line entirely.
• nxdns import --force is renamed --allow-delete.
• A fresh install no longer seeds from /etc/nxdns/config.zon by presence. Use nxdns import once, or run in file mode with --config.
• The admin UI's internals moved to TypeScript 7 and replaced Tailwind with StyleX and React Aria. The visible change is small: selects are real widgets with working keyboard focus; everything else renders as before.
• The config.db schema is a single baseline definition again; numbered migration steps start accumulating at v0.1.

Fixed

• A list switching a name between its exact and wildcard forms never took effect. The compiled-list checksum hashed the exact and wildcard bodies as one unseparated byte stream, so a list carrying a.example and the same list carrying *.a.example produced the same digest, and the refresh kept the old compiled files. The checksum now separates the bodies. Every source recompiles once on its first refresh after the upgrade; no re-download of unchanged content is forced beyond the refresh's normal fetch.
• A refresh could store stale skip counts. When a refresh found the list content unchanged, it wrote the previously stored skip counters back to the database while showing the fresh ones in the UI, and the next restart reverted the numbers to the stale copy. All counters now persist from the fresh compile.
• An Adblock-Plus entry with embedded whitespace (||good.example bad.example^) compiled into an entry no query could ever match. Such lines are now counted as unsupported instead.

[0.0.1] - 2026-08-09

First release. Everything below is new.

Added

• Forwarding DNS server. UDP and TCP listeners with a wire-format parser and encoder written against RFC 1035 and EDNS(0), a bounded worker model, per-client rate limiting and a pause control that stops filtering without stopping resolution.
• Encrypted upstreams. DNS-over-HTTPS and DNS-over-TLS clients over a pool that tracks per-upstream health and fails over, with SNI and certificate verification driven by a per-upstream TLS name.
• DoH and DoT endpoints. nxdns also answers as an encrypted resolver, with a certificate store that reloads on disk changes and through the API, so renewals do not need a restart.
• Blocklist filtering. Subscriptions in hosts, plain-domain and Adblock-Plus-style formats, compiled into a compact matcher; per-group allow and block rules with wildcards; safe-search enforcement.
• Per-client policy groups. Clients are identified by address and assigned to groups, so the filtering a device gets depends on which device it is.
• Local DNS. Local A/AAAA/CNAME/PTR records and conditional forwarding of internal zones to another resolver.
• Cache. A bounded in-memory cache that respects upstream TTLs and expires entries rather than serving them stale.
• Query log. Queries land in SQLite under a retention policy in both rows and days, with disk-full self-protection that degrades instead of corrupting, and a live SSE stream of the same events.
• Web UI and REST API. A React single-page admin UI embedded in the binary, a REST API with a served OpenAPI document, session authentication, API rate limiting and Prometheus-style /metrics.
• Configuration. A ZON configuration file seeds the database on first boot; after that the database is the truth, and nxdns export / nxdns import move configuration in and out. nxdns check validates a file without starting.
• CLI. run, check, export, import, version and help.
• Packaging. A hardened systemd unit with a sysusers fragment, and a FROM scratch container image holding the binary, a CA bundle and the licence files, assembled by a builder stage pinned to alpine:3.22 by digest. Nothing from Alpine ships in the published image except that CA bundle.
• Releases. Tags publish five assets — static musl tarballs for x86_64-linux-musl and aarch64-linux-musl, IMAGE-DIGEST.txt naming the multi-architecture container image by digest, SHA256SUMS.txt over those three, and SHA256SUMS.txt.asc, a detached signature over the checksum file. zig build dist and zig build verify-dist produce and check the same artifacts on a laptop.
• Licensing. EUPL-1.2, with a THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES file in every tarball and image assembled from a reviewed inventory of what the artifacts contain.
• Documentation. A Diátaxis split — tutorial, how-to, reference, explanation — with drift guards that fail the build when the reference pages fall behind the code.