ipv6ddns

README

Network wide IPv6 DDNS Updater

This utility discovers IPv6 addresses on your local network and updates DNS records dynamically. Here is a detailed explanation.

In a nutshell: This tool keeps your domain names (like myserver.example.com) pointing to the correct IPv6 address of your devices, even if those addresses or ipv6 prefixes change, effectively acting as a Dynamic DNS client for your entire network.

🏠 Why do I need this?

Imagine you have a Raspberry Pi at home running a website, Home Assistant, or a game server. You want to access it from anywhere using a domain like my-pi.example.com.

The Problem: Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) might change your home's IPv6 prefix occasionally (e.g., when you restart your router). When this happens, your Raspberry Pi gets a new IPv6 address, and my-pi.example.com stops working because it still points to the old address.

The Solution: Instead of installing a DDNS updater on every single device (which can be tedious), you run ipv6ddns on one device in your network (like your router, a server, or the Pi itself).

1. ipv6ddns continuously watches the network.
2. It detects when your Raspberry Pi (identified by its unique MAC address) gets a new IPv6 address.
3. It automatically updates my-pi.example.com on your DNS provider (like Duckdns, Cloudflare, or your home router) to point to the new IP.

Your setup keeps working, and you don't have to reconfigure anything when IPs change.

Installation

Download and run the latest release for your architecture.

Or Use the Docker Image

This may or may not work on your system—IPv6 in Docker can be tricky. Please do not attempt this unless you're prepared for extensive debugging and possibly making code changes.

I was able to get it working using host networking and without setting "ipv6": true in /etc/docker/daemon.json.

If you have experience with Docker and IPv6 and can help improve this, please reach out—it's been a while since I last looked into it.

docker run -it --rm --network host -v ./config.yaml:/config.yaml gcr.io/miguelangel-nubla/ipv6ddns -live

Or install from source

Ensure you have Go installed on your system. If not, follow the instructions on the official Go website to install it. Then:

go install github.com/miguelangel-nubla/ipv6ddns/cmd/ipv6ddns

🚀 Usage

1. Configure the Service

   Edit the configuration file (config.yaml) to suit your environment. You can start with the provided example config.

2. Run the Binary

   ⚠️ Note: This utility must be run with superuser privileges to listen for IPv6 ICMP packets.

   Use the following command to start the service:

   sudo ipv6ddns [flags]
   

3. Example Command

   Here's an example that runs the service with a custom config, enables the web interface on port 80, and sets the log level to debug:

   sudo ipv6ddns \
     -config_file config.yaml \
     -webserver_port 8053 \
     -log_level debug
   

4. Access the Web report

   After starting the service, you can see the status of the service at:

   http://<your_ip>:8053
   

DDNS providers

The available DDNS providers are:

• Cloudflare (free plan compatible)
• Duckdns (provider only allows a single AAAA record)
• Gravity (hosted locally)
• Mikrotik (RouterOS API)
• OpenWrt (SSH + UCI)
• OPNsense (Unbound DNS via API)
• pfSense (Unbound DNS via REST API)
• Technitium (HTTP API)
• 🚀 If you’re comfortable coding, adding support for your preferred provider is a breeze:
  • Use an existing provider in the ddns/ directory (e.g., cloudflare.go) as a template.
  • Replace all instances of cloudflare with your provider’s name — case-sensitive!
  • Update the API logic in that file to match your provider's requirements.
  • Test your implementation thoroughly.
  • Verify that everything works correctly across multiple IP/prefix rotations.
  • Submit a pull request!

Configuration file

The configuration is done via a config.yaml file. Below is a simplified example showing the structure.

For a complete reference with all available options and more providers, check the example.config.yaml.

tasks:
  # Whichever name you like for this task, it is only for reference
  my_public_web_server:
    # Only update IPv6 addresses within these subnets ("2000::/3" covers all Global Unicast Addresses)
    subnets:
      - 2000::/3
    # MAC addresses of the hosts to monitor
    mac_address:
      - 00:11:22:33:44:55
      - 00:11:22:33:44:56
    endpoints:
      # "example-cloudflare" refers to a credential block defined below
      example-cloudflare:
        # This will update test-webapp.example.com
        - test-webapp
    lifetime: 1h
    # Optional: Update IPv4 (A) records using an external command
    ipv4:
      interval: 3m
      command: curl
      args:
        - -s
        - --ipv4
        - ifconfig.me
      lifetime: 10m

credentials:
  # Name you will use to refer to this endpoint on the tasks
  example-project:
    # One of the supported providers
    provider: cloudflare
    # Provider specific configuration
    settings:
      api_token: CLOUDFLARETOKEN
      zone: example.com
      ttl: 1h
      proxied: true
    # Optional, default 10s. time to wait before pushing updates
    debounce_time: 10s
    # Optional, default 60s. time to wait between retries on update error
    retry_time: 60s
  # ...
  # More credentials if needed
  # ...

# Optional: Discover hosts reading from network devices (pfSense, OPNsense, Mikrotik, etc.)
discovery_plugins:
  - type: mikrotik
    params: mikrotik:192.168.88.1:8729,admin,password,true,

---

What does this do?

The problem

Having a domain name my-web.example.com point to your application on an IPv6 network is both simpler and more challenging than doing it with regular IPv4.

The classic method of directing traffic to your public IPv4 address (i.e., your router) and then using NAT is no longer a good idea, nor necessary.

IPv6 addresses are globally routable, which is nice, but you will need to know the exact IPv6, as different machines or even containers on the same host (and even different applications) will have different "public" IPv6s, or GUAs in IPv6 terminology.

In this scenario DNS names become almost mandatory, good luck trying to remember and type a different https://[2001:0db8:85a3:0000:8a2e:0370:7334:abcd] to access each one of your hosts.

Technically, IPv6 addresses could be static, but part of the beauty of IPv6 is the ability to use and rotate multiple different IP addresses on demand. Even if you don't want to, some ISPs change your IPv6 prefix on router reboot or periodically.

Rationale

You might be thinking well, I will just run a DDNS updater on my server? It turns out that may not be really an option. Depending on your enviroment and ISP, each host (or even application) may have its own, dynamic IPv6. How do you indicate which IP should the DNS record point to? Does that mean the way to do that is to run the updater on the same container as your target application?

Unfortunately yes. That is not a great idea. Aside from the inconvenience of forking and using your own container images, there will be systems that you will not be able to modify. Think about a device on your network that has no way of running a custom executable, like an appliance, or an IP camera.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a single instance of a "DNS updater" anywhere on your network that detects the IPv6 of your desired hosts, identifies when they change, and updates the relevant DNS records accordingly?

The solution

This utility scans the network for the IPv6s of the hosts you want to expose, identified by their MAC address, and updates the corresponding DNS records automatically.

This works for all your network, having the configuration and your credentials in a single place.

---

Other nice usages

Roaming over multiple IPv6 networks

This utility allows you to move between IPv6 networks and to maintain inbound connectivity. You can have as many IPv6 addresses from different ISPs as you like and the AAAA records for your domain will be kept in sync.

For example, you can have a FTTH connection, a backup LTE connection, and Starlink on your roof. Your domain will have updated AAAA records for every WAN connection, inbound WAN failover will simply work.

Roaming over IPv4

While IPv4 is not the focus of this project, you can stil leverage it to do the same for regular IPv4 public IPs.

...
tasks:
  myhome:
    ipv4:
      interval: 3m
      command: curl
      args:
        - -s
        - --ipv4
        - ifconfig.me
      lifetime: 10m
...

For more advanced use cases just write a custom script that returns the IPv4s you need.

...
tasks:
  myhome:
    ipv4:
      interval: 30s
      command: ./print_desired_ipv4s.sh
      args: []
      lifetime: 4m
...

Documentation

Index

• type Endpoint
  • func NewEndpoint(service ddns.Service) *Endpoint
• type Hostname
  • func NewHostname(updateAction func(*ipv6disc.AddrCollection) error, ...) *Hostname
  • func (h *Hostname) ScheduleUpdate(timeout time.Duration)
  • func (h *Hostname) SetAddrCollection(addrCollection *ipv6disc.AddrCollection)
• type InvalidInterfaceError
  • func (e *InvalidInterfaceError) Error() string
• type Provider
  • func NewProvider() *Provider
• type State
  • func NewState() *State
  • func (s *State) PrettyPrint(prefix string, hideSensible bool) string
• type Worker
  • func NewWorker(logger *zap.SugaredLogger, rediscover time.Duration, lifetime time.Duration, ...) *Worker
  • func (w *Worker) PrettyPrint(prefix string, hideSensible bool) string
  • func (w *Worker) RegisterPlugin(p ipv6disc.Plugin)
  • func (w *Worker) Start() error

Types

type Endpoint

type Endpoint struct {
	ddns.Service
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

func NewEndpoint

func NewEndpoint(service ddns.Service) *Endpoint

type Hostname

type Hostname struct {
	ipv6disc.AddrCollection
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

func NewHostname

func NewHostname(updateAction func(*ipv6disc.AddrCollection) error, updateDebounceTime time.Duration, updateRetryInterval time.Duration) *Hostname

func (*Hostname) ScheduleUpdate

func (h *Hostname) ScheduleUpdate(timeout time.Duration)

func (*Hostname) SetAddrCollection

func (h *Hostname) SetAddrCollection(addrCollection *ipv6disc.AddrCollection)

type InvalidInterfaceError

type InvalidInterfaceError struct {
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

func (*InvalidInterfaceError) Error

func (e *InvalidInterfaceError) Error() string

type Provider

type Provider struct {
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

func NewProvider

func NewProvider() *Provider

type State

type State struct {
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

func NewState

func NewState() *State

func (*State) PrettyPrint

func (s *State) PrettyPrint(prefix string, hideSensible bool) string

type Worker

type Worker struct {
	*State
	// contains filtered or unexported fields
}

func NewWorker

func NewWorker(logger *zap.SugaredLogger, rediscover time.Duration, lifetime time.Duration, config config.Config) *Worker

func (*Worker) PrettyPrint

func (w *Worker) PrettyPrint(prefix string, hideSensible bool) string

func (*Worker) RegisterPlugin

func (w *Worker) RegisterPlugin(p ipv6disc.Plugin)

func (*Worker) Start

func (w *Worker) Start() error