How to Stop and Disable Firewalld on CentOS 7

FirewallD is a complete firewall solution that dynamically manages the trust level of network connections and interfaces on the server. It gives you full control over what traffic is allowed or disallowed to and from the system.

Starting with CentOS 7, FirewallD replaces iptables as the default firewall management tool.

It is highly recommended to keep the FirewallD service enabled, but in some cases such as testing, you may need to stop or disable it completely.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to disable FirewallD on CentOS 7 systems.

Before starting with the tutorial, make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privileges .

Check the Firewall Status

To view the current status of the FirewallD service you can use the firewall-cmd command:

sudo firewall-cmd --state

If the FirewallD service is running on your CentOS system the command above will print the following message:

running

Disable Firewall

You can temporarily stop the FirewallD service with the following command:

sudo systemctl stop firewalld

However this change will be valid for the current runtime session only.

To permanently disable the firewall on your CentOS 7 system, follow the steps below:

01. First, stop the FirewallD service with:

sudo systemctl stop firewalld

02. Disable the FirewallD service to start automatically on system boot:

sudo systemctl disable firewalld

The output from the command above will look something like this:

Removed symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/firewalld.service.

Removed symlink /etc/systemd/system/dbus-org.fedoraproject.FirewallD1.service.

03. Mask the FirewallD service which will prevent the firewall from being started by other services:

sudo systemctl mask --now firewalld

As you can see from the output the mask command simply creates a symlink from the firewalld service to /dev/null:

Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/firewalld.service to /dev/null

That's how to stop and permanently disable the firewall on a CentOS 7 machine.