Export & Import

The buttons sit top-right on the dashboard. Export downloads the staged rule set; import replaces it. Neither touches the running firewall — that still needs an apply.

Export	Downloads easywall-rules-<date>.json
Import	Validates, then replaces the staged set entirely — it is not a merge

Import is a replacement. Anything staged that is not in the file is gone after importing. Export first if you are unsure.

The format

One array per rule type. Every field is optional; an absent or empty array means no rules of that kind.

{
  "tcp": [
    {"port": "22",  "description": "SSH",   "ssh": true},
    {"port": "443", "description": "HTTPS", "ssh": false}
  ],
  "udp":        [{"port": "53", "description": "DNS", "ssh": false}],
  "blacklist":  ["192.0.2.1", "198.51.100.0/24"],
  "whitelist":  ["203.0.113.10"],
  "forwarding": [{"protocol": "tcp", "source_port": 2222, "dest_port": 22}],
  "custom":     ["iif eth0 ip protocol udp udp dport 1194 accept"]
}

Key	Shape
tcp, udp	port string, description string, ssh bool
blacklist, whitelist	strings — IPv4, IPv6 or CIDR
forwarding	protocol "tcp" or "udp", source_port int, dest_port int
custom	strings — raw nftables match expressions

What gets rejected

Import validates before staging anything. A file with one bad entry imports nothing.

Refused	Example	Why
A port outside 1–65535	70000
A malformed CIDR	192.168.1.1/33
An address that does not parse	192.0.2.999
A forwarding protocol that is not tcp or udp	sctp
A custom rule containing a newline or a semicolon		nft reads both as the end of one command, so it would be a second command run by the root daemon. The editor splits on newlines and never produced one; a file can
A custom rule nft --check rejects		the editor has always checked as you type; imported rules were not checked at all
A file over 512 KB		room for several thousand addresses. A larger set is easier to place in rules.json directly than to push through a browser upload

Worth doing

Before a risky change	Export. Re-importing beats recreating twenty rules by hand
Migrating a server	Export, transfer, import, apply — and verify before confirming
Version control	The JSON is stable and diffs cleanly next to your Ansible or Terraform

git add easywall-rules-production.json
git commit -m "chore(firewall): open 8080 for staging"