Can I use ufw to setup a port forward?

Im currently using ufw to enforce some basic firewall rules. Is it possible to also use ufw to do port forwarding?

Specifically im wanting to forward incoming traffic to my server (same machine running ufw) on port 80 to port 8080. (http traffic forwarded to tomcat)

Th

Solution 1:

Let's say you want to forward requests going to 80 to a server listening on port 8080.

Note that you will need to make sure port 8080 is allowed, otherwise ufw will block the requests that are redirected to 8080.

sudo ufw allow 8080/tcp

There are no ufw commands for setting up the port forwards, so it must be done via configuraton files. Add the lines below to /etc/ufw/before.rules, before the filter section, right at the top of the file:

*nat
:PREROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]
-A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080
COMMIT

Then restart and enable ufw to start on boot:

sudo ufw enable

Solution 2:

Since ufw 0.34 ufw supports forward rules.

example: sudo ufw route allow in on eth0 out on eth1 to 10.0.0.0/8 port 8080 from 192.168.0.0/16 port 80

You also need to make sure you have the sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward enabled. For most distributions, that's done by editing /etc/sysctl.conf and running sysctl -p or rebooting.

ufw doesn't support NAT through it's easy interface, though.