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PADD (Pi-hole At a Dash, formerly PAD) is a terminal-based dashboard that displays live Pi-hole statistics — queries today, blocked percentage, top blocked domains, and system metrics — directly in the terminal. It is ideal for a dedicated Pi-hole server where you want an at-a-glance status screen without opening a browser.

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Installation via deploy.sh

During the deploy.sh interactive setup you will be prompted at Step 4.8: 
Step 4.8: PADD (Terminal Dashboard)
   Install PADD dashboard? [y/n]:
Type y and press Enter. The script will run: 
wget -N https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pi-hole/PADD/master/padd.sh -O /usr/local/bin/padd
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/padd
PADD is now available system-wide as the padd command.

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Running PADD

Once installed, launch the dashboard from any terminal session: 
padd
PADD will fill the terminal with live statistics including query counts, block rates, upstream DNS latency, CPU temperature, and memory usage. Press Ctrl+C to exit.
PADD reads data directly from Pi-hole’s FTL engine. Ensure pihole-FTL is running before launching PADD:
systemctl status pihole-FTL

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Auto-Start on SSH Login

1

Opt in during installation

Immediately after PADD is installed, deploy.sh will ask:
Auto-start PADD on SSH login? [y/n]:
Type y and press Enter.
2

The script detects the real user's home directory

Because deploy.sh runs as root via sudo, it uses $SUDO_USER (falling back to logname) to find the home directory of the user who invoked the script:
REAL_USER=$SUDO_USER
if [ -z "$REAL_USER" ]; then REAL_USER=$(logname); fi
USER_HOME="/home/$REAL_USER"
This ensures the .bashrc line is added to the correct user’s profile rather than root’s.
3

The script appends a line to ~/.bashrc

The following snippet is added to the user’s ~/.bashrc file. It checks whether the current shell is an interactive SSH session before launching PADD, so it will not fire in non-interactive contexts such as scp or automated scripts:
if [ "$SSH_CONNECTION" ] && [ -t 1 ]; then /usr/local/bin/padd; fi
4

PADD launches automatically on the next SSH login

From this point on, every time you SSH into the server, PADD will start automatically and display the live dashboard.

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Manual Auto-Start Setup

If you skipped the auto-start prompt during installation, you can configure it manually at any time by appending the same line to your ~/.bashrc: 
echo 'if [ "$SSH_CONNECTION" ] && [ -t 1 ]; then /usr/local/bin/padd; fi' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
The change takes effect immediately for new SSH sessions.

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Updating PADD

PADD is a single-file script pulled directly from the Pi-hole GitHub repository. To update to the latest version, re-run the wget command — the -N flag ensures the file is only downloaded if the remote version is newer than the local copy: 
sudo wget -N https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pi-hole/PADD/master/padd.sh -O /usr/local/bin/padd
No service restart is required. The next time you run padd, the updated version will be used.

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