How to add/enable/start Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) during startup in Linux

Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) is a simple/basic host-based firewall configuration tool used to manage iptables in an easy way.  UFW supports both IPv4 & IPv6.

Most of the Linux distros comes without a firewall.  Some Linux distros comes with UFW installed in it but UFW is not enabled by default.

If you are not comfortable with configuring UFW using command line then you may install Gufw which is a GUI to manage Ufw.  But using this tool, you can only add rules or enable/disable the firewall.  To add/enable/start UFW during startup, you have to run commands as root or sudo.

All ufw commands should be run as root or sudo.

After installing UFW, we should configure the basic/important rule.  We should deny all incoming connections by default.  You can either use Gufw and deny the incoming connections as show in the above image or use terminal to do that.  The command to do that is

sudo ufw default deny

 

In Debian & Ubuntu based distros, the command to start UFW (and also enable during startup) is,

sudo ufw enable

 

In Arch based distros, the commands to enable & start UFW during startup are,

sudo systemctl enable ufw
sudo systemctl start ufw

 

You can check the current status of UFW using the following command

sudo ufw status

sudo ufw status verbose