June 28, 2026
DNS or Gleam thirst trap?
Armadillo – A DNS Server in Gleam for Homelab Use
Tiny home internet tool drops, and the comments instantly make it a Gleam fan club showdown
TLDR: Armadillo is a new home DNS tool that helps every device on your network find your custom local web addresses from one central setup. The comments quickly made Gleam the main character, with readers less interested in the server itself than in why its creator chose that language and keeps coming back to it.
A new self-hosted home network tool called Armadillo has rolled in with a very specific promise: set it up once on your router, and every phone, laptop, TV, and random gadget in your house can find your custom local site names automatically. In plain English, it’s a little traffic guide for your home internet, with a web dashboard, a backup lookup service for anything it doesn’t know, and a warning label that basically screams, do not use .local unless you enjoy chaos on Apple devices.
But the real fireworks came from the community reaction, which instantly swerved from “nice project” to language discourse. The strongest vibe in the thread wasn’t panic over features or setup drama — it was curiosity bordering on obsession about why this was written in Gleam, a newer programming language most non-coders have never heard of. One commenter, developr, practically kicked off an impromptu fan Q&A by asking what pulled the creator toward Gleam and why it made them want to keep building. That turned the comment section into less of a product review and more of a “sell me on this language” audition.
There wasn’t much open fighting yet, but there was definitely that familiar tech-world tension: is this a practical home tool, or secretly a love letter to a favorite coding language? And yes, the setup notes about port 53, home routers, and VPN weirdness gave the whole thing a delightfully niche energy — the kind of post that makes homelab fans grin while everyone else backs away slowly.
Key Points
- •Armadillo is a self-hosted DNS server for homelab use written in Gleam and intended to be set as the router's DNS resolver for local-domain resolution across a network.
- •When queries arrive, Armadillo checks local records first, and if no match exists, it forwards the request to a configurable upstream resolver, caches the response by TTL, and returns it to the client.
- •Local DNS records are stored in a zone file, loaded into ETS on startup, and all runtime query resolution uses ETS rather than reading the zone file during handling.
- •The article provides a Linux deployment example using Podman, systemd, and Caddy, including port 53 binding configuration, container setup, and exposing the web UI through a local domain.
- •The project documentation advises avoiding the .local suffix because of mDNS/Bonjour behavior under RFC 6762 and suggests alternatives such as .lan or .internal.