There are a few reasons why you may need to enable or disable the firewall on your system. Managing the firewall on Manjaro Linux can be done either via GUI or the command line. In this guide, we’ll show you methods for both.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to add enable or disable firewall from GUI (XFCE)
- How to enable or disable firewall from command line
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Manjaro Linux |
| Software | N/A |
| Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
| Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Enable/Disable Firewall via GUI
The Manjaro download page lists quite a few GUI options, and the distro supports many more. Depending on which GUI you’re using (XFCE, KDE, GNOME, etc), the instructions for enabling or disabling the system firewall via GUI are going to vary a little. Since Manjaro’s first recommendation is XFCE, we’ll cover the instructions to enable/disable the firewall in XFCE on Manjaro. Regardless of which graphical interface you’re using, the instructions should be similar.
- Begin by opening XFCE’s application launcher (lower left corner of the screen by default) and typing ‘firewall’ to quickly find the Firewall Configuration app. Open it.
Open the Firewall Configuration app - In this menu, you’re able to configure firewall rules for your Manjaro system. Most importantly, you’re able switch the firewall on or off by dragging the toggle bar back and forth. In the screenshot below, the firewall is currently off.
The firewall is currently set to off but the red bar can be toggled to turn it on
- Once enabled, the bar will turn green and you’ll see “Firewall enabled” at the bottom of the window.
Toggle the firewall on
Change your firewall to the desired setting, then you can close the Firewall Configuration menu. Your settings will be saved, even after system reboot.
Enable/Disable Firewall via Command Line
Similar to Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions, Manjaro uses ufw (uncomplicated firewall) to manage firewall rules. This makes the firewall pretty easy to toggle on or off, as you’ll see below
First, to see whether or not your firewall is currently enabled, open a terminal and type the following command:
$ sudo ufw status
To enable the firewall, you can execute the next command. Note that this will also set the firewall to start up automatically each time the system reboots.
$ sudo ufw enable
To disable the firewall, type:
$ sudo ufw disable
Conclusion
That’s all there is to it. Enabling and disabling the firewall in Manjaro is a cinch, whether you choose to do it via GUI or the command line. Firewall configuration with UFW is very easy to learn, so if you’re interested in knowing more, check out our article on how to install and use UFW for further reading.
