Building Custom Geosite Lists Just Got Easier

If you've ever needed to manage domain-based routing for a proxy or firewall, you know the pain of maintaining those domain lists. Whether you're setting up a privacy tool, a country-specific filter, or a custom content blocker, keeping a clean, up-to-date geosite.dat file can feel like a chore. That's where this community project comes in.

It turns out there's a better way than manually curating thousands of lines in a text file. The v2fly domain list community project provides a structured, collaborative approach to building these essential resources.

What It Does

This GitHub repository is essentially a massive, crowd-sourced collection of domain lists, categorized by purpose and region. Think of it as a giant, well-organized spreadsheet of domains, where each tab is a different category like "ads," "social," or "cn" (for China). The magic happens when you compile these lists into a geosite.dat file—a binary format used by various proxy and routing software to efficiently match domains.

The project provides the tools and structure to take these plain text lists and generate the optimized geosite.dat files that your software can actually use.

Why It's Cool

The clever part isn't just the list itself—it's the system. Instead of one monolithic file, domains are split into logical, reusable categories. Need a list for blocking ads and tracking across the US and Europe? You can combine the ads category with the us and eu regional lists. Building a routing rule for social media? Grab the social category.

This modularity means you can build highly specific geosite files without duplication or bloat. The community-driven aspect keeps lists current with the ever-changing web. When a new social network or ad domain pops up, someone can submit a pull request, and everyone benefits.

For developers integrating domain-based features, this is a huge time saver. You're not starting from scratch or relying on potentially outdated static lists. You're building on a maintained, version-controlled foundation.

How to Try It

Head over to the v2fly/domain-list-community repository. You'll find all the categorized lists in the data directory.

To generate your own geosite.dat file, you'll need to use a compatible compiler, like domain-list-community's own build tool or one from projects like v2ray or Xray. The repository's README provides guidance. The basic workflow is:

1. Clone the repo.
2. Select the categories you want (e.g., category-ads, category-cn).
3. Use the build tool to compile these categories into a single geosite.dat file.
4. Point your application (like v2ray, Xray, or compatible clients) to this new file.

You can also directly download pre-built geosite.dat files from the releases of related projects if you just want to use the standard community lists.

Final Thoughts

As someone who's wasted hours trimming and validating domain lists, I see this project as a practical solution to a real problem. It's not flashy, but it's incredibly useful. Whether you're a developer building a network tool, a power user crafting a custom setup, or just someone who wants more control over their traffic, this structured approach to domain lists is a win. It turns a tedious maintenance task into a simple configuration choice.

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