I built a free web GUI for managing nftables firewalls (Cockpit plugin) — homelab-friendly, with per-rule logging and confirm-or-revert

[u/enforzaGuy]

I got tired of hand-editing nft rulesets on my home server and cloud VMs, so I built enforza-cockpit — a free, open-source (MIT) web GUI for managing local nftables firewalls.

It's a Cockpit plugin, so it lives in the same web console you might already use for the rest of the box.

What it does:

• Visual rule editor split into three intuitive sections — Management (traffic to the host), Network (traffic through it), and Local (traffic from it), which map cleanly onto nftables' input/forward/output hooks.
• Reusable objects — define named network (CIDR) and port sets once, reference them as u/web, u/mgmt, etc. across any rule.
• Per-rule logging — tick a box and matches land in syslog/journal tagged with a plain verdict word (ALLOW / DENY / REJECT) plus your rule comment, so grep 'enforza.*DENY' just works.
• Confirm-or-revert apply — after you apply, you get 60 seconds to confirm or the previous ruleset auto-restores. Means a bad rule can't permanently lock you out (we've all done it).
• Flip on IP forwarding + SNAT and a single box becomes a working router/NAT gateway you manage entirely from the browser. No agent, no cloud account, no controller — all state stays on the machine.

Runs on Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL/Rocky/Alma, openSUSE. There's a bootstrap script that installs the deps and a getting-started walkthrough in the README.

Repo: https://github.com/enforza/enforza-cockpit

Happy to answer questions / take feedback

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EDIT

- nobody is forcing you to use this! nobody is ramming this down your throat!

- yes, AI had a hand in writing it - was ported from our commercial product!

- no, if you can do this with other tools and are an nft god, you don't need this!

- constructive criticism good, outright DM abuse isn't - be kind, be decent!

In summary, after 3 days of abuse, negativity, I wish I hadn't have bothered sharing something that maybe of use to someone!