UFW Parser

Overview

UFW Parser fetches and parses UFW firewall rules from Linux servers — locally or remotely over SSH — and presents them in a clean, tabular, exportable format.

It is built for reviewing and documenting firewall configuration across a fleet: rules are grouped per server and can be exported straight to Ansible host_vars YAML to bring existing servers under configuration management.

Rules are read from the same lines UFW rebuilds its own rule list from, so allow, deny, reject and limit rules, IPv6 addresses, port ranges and routed rules all come through as UFW stores them.

Key Features

• Local or remote — Read UFW rules from local copies or over SSH with sudo, including SSH agent support. Host keys are checked against known_hosts.
• Every rule type — Allow, deny, reject and limit rules, logging, incoming, outgoing and routed rules, port lists and ranges, IPv4 and IPv6 addresses with prefix length.
• Per-server grouping — Groups and consolidates firewall rules per server; servers are read in parallel.
• Multiple export formats — Terminal table, CSV, Excel, or Ansible host_vars YAML with community.general.ufw parameters.
• Ready for scripts — Exit codes report servers that could not be read and skipped rules; failures are listed at the end of the run.
• Structured logs — Logging with file rotation, plus a debug mode.
• Modular design — CLI-driven and easy to extend.

Installation

Requirements

• Python 3.10 or newer
• For remote servers: SSH access with the host key in known_hosts, and sudo without a password for reading the rule files

git clone https://github.com/qf3l3k/ufw_parser.git
cd ufw_parser
pip install .

Configuration

Copy examples/hosts.example.yml to ~/.config/ufw_parser/hosts.yml and list the servers and how to reach them:

servers:
  web-01:
    hostname: web-01.example.com
    processing: local
    rule_path: /path/to/backup/web-01.example.com/etc/ufw
  db-01:
    hostname: db-01.example.com
    processing: remote
    ssh_user: admin
    use_ssh_agent: true
    rule_path: /etc/ufw

Usage

ufw_parser -c ~/.config/ufw_parser/hosts.yml -o ansible_yaml -of ~/exports/

Related Resources

• Full documentation — Requirements, installation and usage on docs.chaintools.tech
• UFW documentation — Uncomplicated Firewall on Ubuntu
• Ansible host_vars — Where the exported YAML fits in an Ansible inventory
• Report an issue — Bugs and feature requests