How to Install PowerDNS on macOS

PowerDNS is a popular open-source DNS server that provides high scalability and performance. In this tutorial, we'll guide you through the process of installing PowerDNS on macOS.

Prerequisites

  • macOS installed
  • Homebrew (A package manager for macOS)

Step 1 — Install PowerDNS

  1. Launch the Terminal application by either searching for it in Spotlight or navigating to Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
  2. In the Terminal, type the following command to install PowerDNS via Homebrew:
brew install pdns
  1. Press Enter to run the command.
  2. Wait for the installation to finish. This may take a few minutes, so be patient.
  3. Once installed, you can verify that PowerDNS is correctly installed on your system by checking the version number:
pdns_server --version
  1. Press Enter to run the command. The version number of the installed PowerDNS server will be displayed in the Terminal.

Step 2 — Launch PowerDNS

To launch PowerDNS, run the following command in your Terminal:

sudo pdns_server

This will start the PowerDNS server process as a superuser, which is necessary for the server to bind to port 53 (the default DNS port) and listen for incoming DNS queries.

If this is your first time launching the PowerDNS server, it may take a few moments to start up. Once the server is running, you can confirm that it is operational by using the dig command to query the server for a DNS record:

dig google.com @localhost

This will send a DNS query to the PowerDNS server running on your local machine, asking for the IP address of the Google homepage. If the server is working correctly, you should see a response containing the IP address of the Google homepage.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to install PowerDNS on macOS via Homebrew and start up the server process. With PowerDNS running on your machine, you can configure it to serve DNS records for your own domains, creating a DNS infrastructure that's both scalable and high-performance.