How To Install CSF Firewall on AlmaLinux 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install CSF Firewall on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, ConfigServer Security & Firewall (it is also called CSF in short) is a Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) firewall, Login/Intrusion Detection, and Security application for Linux servers. Furthermore, it is absolutely free to us.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the CSF Firewall on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: AlmaLinux 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install CSF Firewall on AlmaLinux 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf install perl-libwww-perl.noarch perl-LWP-Protocol-https.noarch perl-GDGraph wget tar perl-Math-BigInt

Step 2. Disable firewalld and any other iptables firewall.

Run the following command below to disable any other iptables firewall:

sudo systemctl stop firewalld
sudo systemctl disable firewalld

Step 3. Installing CSF Firewall on AlmaLinux 8.

Now we run the following commands below to download, extract and install CSF Firewall to your system:

cd /usr/src
wget https://download.configserver.com/csf.tgz
tar -xzf csf.tgz
cd csf
sh install.sh

At this point, the CSF firewall has been installed and it is ready to use on your server. Next, run this command to check if your cloud server has the required iptable modules:

perl /usr/local/csf/bin/csftest.pl

Step 4. Start using CSF Firewall on AlmaLinux.

Let us being by running the following command to turn off testing mode:

sed 's/TESTING = "1"/TESTING = "0"/g' /etc/csf/csf.conf

Then, restart CSF Firewall using the following command:

csf -r

Congratulations! You have successfully installed CSF Firewall. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing ConfigServer Security & Firewall (CSF) on your AlmaLinux 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official CSF Firewall website.