Easy firewall setup for Manjaro Linux

Created January 9, 2014 · Updated June 27, 2026 · 1 min read · 211 words

After installing Manjaro on my notebook, I was astounded to see that unlike numerous other distributions of Linux it did not enable a firewall by default - especially since it ships with iptables and its user-friendly frontend, ufw.

Admittedly, this would not be too big of a deal if I did not run services on my laptop nor connected to public networks once in a while, but even then, having a firewall configured let’s me work more soundly. Here is how I set up and enabled iptables on Manjaro using ufw:

ufw is a command line application. Don’t let that scare you though, its commands are pretty easy to understand and type in. If in doubt, just enter the lines highlighted below into a terminal.
Tell ufw to deny incoming requests by default:
Terminal window
```
sudo ufw default deny
```
In my case, I wanted to be able to access my computer via SSH from anywhere, so I ran this line:
Terminal window
```
sudo ufw allow SSH
```
Now enable ufw itself:
Terminal window
```
sudo ufw enable
```
Enable ufw as a systemd service (so it starts together with Linux):
Terminal window
```
sudo systemctl enable ufw
```
The firewall will be active after the next boot, but let’s start it immediately without restarting the computer:
Terminal window
```
sudo systemctl start ufw
```
Finally we can check the status of ufw:
Terminal window
```
sudo ufw status
```

That command should output something similar to this:

                Status: active

        To                         Action      From
        --                         ------      ----
        SSH                        ALLOW       Anywhere
        SSH (v6)                   ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)