disabling domain caching

[5cat]

My goal is to disable the domain caching because I'm using pihole just for dns filtering and custom dns record. I have another recursive dns resolver with caching built in so i dont need the pihole caching, it is just causing website to not load.

Based on this page, I can either

1. edit the /etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf file
2. edit the /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf file and restart pihole via phiole -r The second is not an option since pihole -r does not run in docker, running it will give Function not supported in Docker images.

Here is my attempts I already have persistent volume for /etc/pihole so i added the CACHE_SIZE in the /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf, restarted the deployment and nothing changed. the cache size is still 1k.

I tried to add cache-size=0 value to the .Values.dnsmasq.customSettings but it gives an error since i guess no duplicate values are allowed in /etc/dnsmasq.d based on this 6 year old reddit reply.

I tried to do something naughty by mounting the /etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf as a configMap using the following values.yaml

extraVolumeMounts:
  pihole-01-dnsmasq:
    mountPath: /etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf
    subPath: 01-pihole.conf

extraVolumes:
  pihole-01-dnsmasq:
    configMap:
      defaultMode: 420
      name: pihole-01-dnsmasq

with

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: pihole-01-dnsmasq 
data:
  01-pihole.conf: |
    # Pi-hole: A black hole for Internet advertisements
    # (c) 2017 Pi-hole, LLC (https://pi-hole.net)
    # Network-wide ad blocking via your own hardware.
    #
    # Dnsmasq config for Pi-hole's FTLDNS
    #
    # This file is copyright under the latest version of the EUPL.
    # Please see LICENSE file for your rights under this license.

    ###############################################################################
    #      FILE AUTOMATICALLY POPULATED BY PI-HOLE INSTALL/UPDATE PROCEDURE.      #
    # ANY CHANGES MADE TO THIS FILE AFTER INSTALL WILL BE LOST ON THE NEXT UPDATE #
    #                                                                             #
    #        IF YOU WISH TO CHANGE THE UPSTREAM SERVERS, CHANGE THEM IN:          #
    #                      /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf                             #
    #                                                                             #
    #        ANY OTHER CHANGES SHOULD BE MADE IN A SEPARATE CONFIG FILE           #
    #                    WITHIN /etc/dnsmasq.d/yourname.conf                      #
    ###############################################################################

    addn-hosts=/etc/pihole/local.list
    addn-hosts=/etc/pihole/custom.list

    localise-queries

    no-resolv

    cache-size=0

    log-queries
    log-facility=/var/log/pihole.log

    log-async
    server=192.168.100.3
    interface=eth0

which did not work since it looks like the file is autogenerated and pihole seems to delete the 01-pihole.conf to regenerate it because i got the following error in the logs

 ::: Starting docker specific checks & setup for docker pihole/pihole

  [i] Installing configs from /etc/.pihole...
  [i] Existing dnsmasq.conf found... it is not a Pi-hole file, leaving alone!
install: cannot remove '/etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf': Device or resource busy
  [i] Installing /etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf...[cont-init.d] 20-start.sh: exited 1.

I thought of setting the max-cache-ttl=0 in the .Values.dnsmasq.customSettings but that did not work the pihole process kept restarting in the logs

Stopping pihole-FTL
pihole-FTL: no process found
Starting pihole-FTL (no-daemon) as pihole

so i sat that to 1 meaning each dns record will live for one second .

dnsmasq:
  customSettings:
    - max-cache-ttl=1

I dont know what are the performance implication of this and i dont think this is the best way to disable the cache ( it is only enabled for one second here).

The only hacky solution that worked is

kubectl exec -n network -it $(kubectl get pod -l app=pihole -n network -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') -- bash -c "sed -i 's/cache-size=.*$/cache-size=0/' /etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf && pihole restartdns"

where network is the namespace and app=pihole i guess is the app label i gave when i installed it via helm.

Is there another option to actually disable dns caching in a kubernetic way?