What it is

A dnsmasq being populated by aliases made in a UniFi controller.

But why?

To make up for the fact that UniFi USG doesn't have hostname alias/override for clients.

How it works

It polls a UniFi controller and writes client aliases and IP addresses to a file being picked up by dnsmasq. Clients with DNS-incompatible names will be skipped.

Configuration

unifi-dns

• Copy docker-compose.example.yml from here
• Set the relevant values for these environment variables:

Name	Description	Default value
UNIFI_BASEURL	URL to UniFi controller	https://unifi:8443
UNIFI_USERNAME	Username to UniFi controller	-
UNIFI_PASSWORD	Password to UniFi controller	-
UNIFI_POLL_INTERVAL	Seconds between API calls to UniFi Controller	60
UNIFI_SITE	UniFi "site" name	default
FIXED_ONLY	Flag for only handling clients with reserved IP	False

• docker-compose up
• UniFi clients with DNS-compatible aliases will be written to /etc/dnsmasq.d/unifi.hosts.
• dnsmasq will look in /etc/dnsmasq.d and read *.conf files as additional config files and *.hosts files as additional host files, so feel free to put any additional stuff there.

UniFi USG

• Go to Settings -> Networks -> LAN
• Set "DHCP Name Server" to manual and enter the IP of the machine running unifi-dns (and some fallback servers)