A few months ago I went on a quest for a DNS server and was dissatisfied with current maintained projects. They were either good at adblocking (Blocky, grimd…) or good at specifying custom DNS (CoreDNS…).
So I forked grimd and embarked on rewriting a good chunk of it for it to address my needs - the result is leng.
- it is fast
- it is small
- it is easy
- you can specify blocklists and it will fetch them for you
- you can specify custom DNS records with proper zone file syntax (SRV records, etc)
- it supports DNS-over-HTTPS so you can stay private
- it is well-documented
- can be deployed on systemd, docker, or Nix
I have been running it as my nameserver in a Nomad cluster since! I plan to keep maintaining and improving it, so feel free to give it a try if it also fulfils your needs
Pihole reloading in my case is probably mostly slow because of the hardware. That signal functionality to reload is pretty neat, though I think I disagree with the config files being the only thing specifying the servers behaviour exactly being a big advantage. In an environment using infrastructure as code it would probably be better to define DNS over the generic nsupdate API (e.g. with ansible or other equivalent tools) than having to write custom code to reload some config files that have to be regenerated every time. But for smaller home setups both options are probably fine anyhow.
I think there are two approaches to infrastructure as code (and even code in general):
Both should scale (in my company we use templating a lot) but I find the latter easier to debug, because you can ‘see’ the expected end result. But it boils down to personal preference really.
As for your case, ideally you don’t write custom code to generate your template (I agree with you in that it’s tedious!), but you use the templating tool of your framework of choice. You can see this example, it’s on grimd (what I forked leng from) and Nomad, but it might be useful to you.
P.S also added to the docs on the signal reloading here