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I'm doing a hardware refresh on a my Colo, I just need to copy my UFW rules from my old server to my new server. I dont seem to be able to get them copy all the active rules from my old server to my new one.

How do I copy my active UFW rules between servers?

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    I found it in /lib/ufw/user.rules and /lib/ufw/user6.rules. I copy that between server, deactivate and reactive ufw and the rules applied.
    – Squidly
    Oct 2, 2011 at 2:18
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    Squidly you can answer and accept your own answer to your question. It may help others who run into a similar problem as they may skip this question if they see it has 0 replies and doesn't have an accepted answer.
    – 3dinfluence
    Oct 2, 2011 at 2:30

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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I found the rules in /etc/ufw/user.rules and for ipv6 you can find the rules in /etc/ufw/user6.rules.

If you copy those files between the servers, disable and then re-enable ufw.

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    I couldn't find the rules in /lib/ufw on a recent installation of UFW. /etc/ufw seems to be the right place,
    – Chetan Bhargava
    Jan 12, 2018 at 5:23
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    This answer is no longer correct. The rules are in /etc/ufw/[after.init, before.init, ufw.conf, user.rules and so on]
    – Kurt
    Nov 3, 2019 at 15:44
  • where are comments kept?
    – Pawel Cioch
    Feb 3, 2022 at 3:12
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User configurations for UFW should be in /etc/ufw. You are not supposed to modify files in /lib nor /usr/lib nor any other similar locations, because your modifications might get overwritten by the vendor's default version after the packages upgraded.

From Ubuntu 16.04:

ls /etc/ufw

after6.rules applications.d before.rules user6.rules
after.init before6.rules sysctl.conf user.rules
after.rules before.init ufw.conf

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  • Valid for Devuan 2.0 too
    – Joril
    Sep 6, 2018 at 9:07
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Another solution could be:

Save current config with:

iptables-save >/to/some/filename

Then restore it with:

iptables-restore </to/some/filename

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  • This is a bad approach since iptables-save would spit out all other rules not relevant to UFW rules (example: docker puts its stuff into iptables, fail2ban, custom rules like traffic shaping etc.) Much better approach would be to get "UFW only" rules from the /etc/ufw/ folder.
    – Dmitry Shevkoplyas
    Feb 21 at 15:25
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Those /lib/ufw/user.rules /lib/ufw/user6.rules are just symlinks to /etc/ufw/user...

Copy those files from and to /etc/ufw directory

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  • there are no symlinks in /bin/ufw/ in my recent ufw installation
    – Chetan Bhargava
    Jan 12, 2018 at 5:25

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