How to persist iptables rules after reboots

In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to persist iptables rules across reboots.

Rules Peristence

By default, when you create iptables rules its active, but as soon as you restart your server, the rules will be gone. Therefore we need to persist these rules across reboots.

Dependencies

We require the package iptables-persistent and I will install it on a debian system so I will be using apt:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install iptables-persistent -y

Ensure that the service is enabled to start on boot:

sudo systemctl enable netfilter-persistent

Creating Iptables Rules

In this case I will allow port 80 on TCP from all sources:

sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

To persist our current rules, we need to save them to /etc/iptables/rules.v4 with iptables-save:

sudo iptables-save > /etc/iptables/rules.v4

Now when we restart, our rules will be loaded and our previous defined rules will be active.

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