Installation #

CoreDNS is written in Go, but unless you want to develop plugins or compile CoreDNS yourself, you probably don’t care. The following sections detail how you can get CoreDNS binaries or install from source.

Binaries #

For every CoreDNS release, we provide pre-compiled binaries for various operating systems. For Linux, we also provide cross-compiled binaries for ARM, PowerPC and other architectures.

Docker #

We push every release as Docker images as well. You can find them in the public Docker hub for the CoreDNS organization. This Docker image is basically scratch + CoreDNS + TLS certificates (for DoT, DoH, and gRPC).

Source #

To compile CoreDNS, we assume you have a working Go setup. See various tutorials if you don’t have that already configured. CoreDNS is using Go modules for its dependency management.

The most current document on how to compile things is kept in the coredns source.

Testing #

Once you have a coredns binary, you can use the -plugins flag to list all the compiled plugins. Without a Corefile (See Configuration) CoreDNS will load the whoami plugin that will respond with the IP address and port of the client. So to test, we start CoreDNS to run on port 1053 and send it a query using dig:

$ ./coredns -dns.port=1053
.:1053
2018/02/20 10:40:44 [INFO] CoreDNS-1.0.5
2018/02/20 10:40:44 [INFO] linux/amd64, go1.10,
CoreDNS-1.0.5
linux/amd64, go1.10,

And from a different terminal window, a dig should return something similar to this:

$ dig @localhost -p 1053 a whoami.example.org

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;whoami.example.org.		IN	A

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
whoami.example.org.	0	IN	AAAA	::1
_udp.whoami.example.org. 0	IN	SRV	0 0 39368 .

The next section will show how to enable more interesting plugins.