How To Setup UFW Firewall on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to setup UFW Firewall on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The default firewall configuration tool for Ubuntu is ufw. Developed to ease iptables firewall setup, ufw provides a user-friendly way to produce an IPv4 or IPv6 host-based antivirus. By default UFW is disabled.

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 the step-by-step installation UFW Firewall on an Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• 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.

Setup UFW Firewall on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing UFW Firewall on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

In Ubuntu 18.04, UFW is installed by default. If not, you can easily install it by running the following command:

apt-get install ufw

To check whether ufw is running run:

systemctl status ufw

After installation, UFW is deactivated. If you configure your server via SSH, it is important to release SSH before you enable UFW:

ufw allow ssh

Step 3. UFW control.

Turn on:

ufw enable

Turn off:

ufw disable

Attention! The following are examples, please use them only if you know what you are doing!

Allow protocol:

ufw allow ssh

Allow port:

ufw allow 22

Allow Port Ranges:

ufw allow 1000:2000

Prohibit connections:

Deny protocol:

ufw deny ssh

Deny port:

ufw deny 22

To see all services that can be allowed or denied in the system check out the /etc/services file:

$ cat /etc/services | less

Sample output:

ftp-data        20/tcp
ftp             21/tcp
fsp             21/udp          fspd
ssh             22/tcp                          # SSH Remote Login Protocol
ssh             22/udp
telnet          23/tcp
smtp            25/tcp          mail
time            37/tcp          timserver
time            37/udp          timserver
rlp             39/udp          resource        # resource location
nameserver      42/tcp          name            # IEN 116
whois           43/tcp          nicname
tacacs          49/tcp                          # Login Host Protocol (TACACS)
tacacs          49/udp
re-mail-ck      50/tcp                          # Remote Mail Checking Protocol
re-mail-ck      50/udp
domain          53/tcp                          # Domain Name Server
domain          53/udp

For more usage commands you can use the –help flag:

ufw --help

Step 4. Managing UFW via a graphical user interface (GUI).

Install gufw package if you wish to manage our UFW firewall via the graphical user interface application:

apt install gufw

Once installed, start Gufw by searching your start menu:

Congratulations! You have successfully install and setup UFW. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing UFW Firewall on your Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official UFW Firewall website.

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