How To Setup UFW Firewall on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up UFW Firewall on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, UFW is an acronym for an uncomplicated firewall. Securing a network with an uncomplicated firewall is super easy and highly recommended.

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 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 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 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

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

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing UFW on Ubuntu.

UFW is part of the standard Ubuntu 20.04 installation and should be present on your system. If for some reason it is not installed, you can install using the following command:

sudo apt install ufw

Check the current firewall status:

sudo ufw status verbose

Step 3. UFW control.

Turn on:

ufw enable

Turn off:

ufw disable

Attention! The following are examples, please use 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

You can list all application profiles available on your server by typing:

sudo ufw app list

The output will look similar to the following:

Available applications:
  Nginx Full
  Nginx HTTP
  Nginx HTTPS
  OpenSSH

To find more information about a specific profile and included rules, use the following command:

sudo ufw app info 'Nginx Full'

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

ufw --help

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

To control the UFW firewall via the GUI interface you will need to install the gufw package:

apt install gufw

Once installed, start Gufw by searching your start menu:

Congratulations! You have successfully installed and set up UFW. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing UFW Firewall on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official UFW Firewall website.