How to Keep Your Mac's Hosts Blocklists Up to Date

A hosts blocklist is a snapshot. Its maintainers add new ad, tracker and malware domains every week, and remove ones that broke real sites. A copy you installed months ago misses the new ones and keeps the mistakes.

The manual way

To refresh a list by hand you download it again, put back any lines you changed, write the result to /etc/hosts, and flush the DNS cache:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts -o ~/hosts.new
# re-apply your own edits to ~/hosts.new, then:
sudo cp ~/hosts.new /etc/hosts
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

It works, but it is easy to forget, and a half-finished download can leave you with a broken hosts file.

The SaneHosts way

• Update Now: any profile built from lists shows when its lists were last updated. Click Update Now to fetch fresh copies.
• Weekly updates: on by default. To check, open Settings > General > Blocklists and look for Update lists every week. SaneHosts refreshes the active profile while it runs. Once you have allowed SaneHosts in System Settings, it does this without asking for your password.
• Files from your Mac: a profile imported from a file on your Mac reads that file again when you click Update Now.

Your changes survive

An update merges the new lists into your profile. Entries you turned off stay off, and your custom redirects stay put. If a list fails to download, nothing changes: the profile and your hosts file stay exactly as they were.

Which lists are worth keeping current?

SaneHosts ships 30 maintained lists in 8 categories, including Steven Black, Hagezi, AdGuard and malware lists. Every list in the catalog downloads, has been updated in the past year, and is labeled with its real size.

Related guides