Prerequisite for running more than one PiHole replica. A second replica with a fresh PVC would have come up serving DNS and blocking nothing, with a different admin password -- answers varying by which pod replied. pihole.toml's own ### CHANGED markers gave the exact inventory: four settings already came from env (declared), one came from the image, and exactly ONE operator-set value lived only on the PVC -- webserver.api.pwhash, a one-way hash nobody could recover. Separately the adlists were undeclared: one list and 72,234 gravity domains that nothing in this repo named. Declares both: - A SOPS secret feeding FTLCONF_webserver_api_password. webserver.api.password takes cleartext and FTL hashes it itself (verified: pihole setpassword IS setFTLConfigValue on that key), so the PVC's pwhash becomes derived state. - A level-triggered postStart hook that reconciles the declared adlist set into gravity.db -- adds, re-enables, and disables (never deletes) undeclared lists, running pihole -g only when something moved. A file would not work: v6's adlists.list import is migration-only, guarded on the DB not existing. The rendered hook was run in the live pod against throwaway copies of gravity.db, exercising all four paths. A fresh DB built from the image's own schema template has ZERO adlists, confirming this is load-bearing rather than cosmetic. Password kept rather than set empty: the pihole Service still publishes port 80 past the oauth2-proxy, closed only by policy, and default-deny has drifted here before. Multi-replica is phase 2 and deliberately not in this branch -- it needs a schema field, a StatefulSet (the config PVC is RWO), anti-affinity and a PDB. Adds a *.sops.yaml -- a sensitive path -- so approval-policy will block pending an operator /approve-override. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>