Global whitelist support?

[PeterDaveHello]

Not sure if I understand correctly.

Currently, if I have three blacklist groups, name ads, phishing & parking-domain, and I only have one whitelist group, called safelist, I want to make sure that all the hosts in the safelist will not be blocked, then I can't name the whitelist group safelist, instead, I need to duplicate the group three times, and named them ads, phishing & parking-domain accordingly, am I right?

Using a different name for the whitelist will have the result that the document mentioned:

If a group has only whitelist entries -> this means only domains from this list are allowed, all other domains will be blocked

Is it possible that we can have a more efficient way to maintain the whitelist group? Or I'm using it the wrong way? Thanks a lot!

[0xERR0R]

This is actually the way how it works. You can define different groups for blocking and a whitelist to "override"/"disable" of some blocking entries. If you have 3 groups and you want to reuse a whitelist for all three, I think there is currently no way to achieve it without defining 3 whitelists with corresponding names.

[PeterDaveHello]

Not sure if the manual duplicate of the groups also makes the memory consumption also become multiple times more? On a small VPS, it seems the memory become not enough once I did it 😅

[ThinkChaos]

You should be able to use YAML anchors for this. In this example, b will have the same contents as a when parsed:

a: &anchor
  x: y

b:
  <<: *anchor

[PeterDaveHello]

YAML anchor could be a working approach here, though sometimes not so easy to read or maintain it 😅

[PeterDaveHello]

I may remember it wrong, and not familiar enough with YAML, because it's not a key-value pair, it looks like can be done yet.

Refererce:

• Merge arrays yaml/yaml#35
• Merging sequences (like Merge keys for mappings) yaml/yaml#48

[ThinkChaos]

Ah that sucks. I didn't test it before posting, sorry!
I don't have this issue because I just use a single whitelist and its empty for now. Also my config is generated (with NixOS) so I could copy sections quite easily.

I think it'd be fair to re-open the issue for this @0xERR0R ?

[PeterDaveHello]

No problem at all, I guess my scenario is a little more complex than usual, so that I'll need to have some global/base rules, and then have some additional lists enabled for certain groups.

[ThinkChaos]

Just figured out why I thought using anchors would worke: GitLab CI supports it (docs).
The issue for it says they flatten the array, and indeed if I replace the config section's type in Blocky from map[string][]string to map[string]interface{}, it unmarshals the following successfully:

blackLists:
  default: &test-anchor
  - a
  - b
  other:
  - *test-anchor

So it would be possible to handle nested arrays transparently in Blocky to allow using anchors.
Whether that's the best way to achieve this in Blocky is another question though.