UFW firewall is not working on Ubuntu in DigitalOcean

Alternative solution: Drop UFW and instead use Network Firewall available in digital ocean control panel (on website).

Doing this DOCKER_OPTS="--iptables=false" didn't work for me.

I suggest to add these lines at the end of /etc/ufw/after.rules

# BEGIN UFW AND DOCKER
*filter
:ufw-user-forward - [0:0]
:ufw-docker-logging-deny - [0:0]
:DOCKER-USER - [0:0]
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-user-forward

-A DOCKER-USER -j RETURN -s 10.0.0.0/8
-A DOCKER-USER -j RETURN -s 172.16.0.0/12
-A DOCKER-USER -j RETURN -s 192.168.0.0/16

-A DOCKER-USER -p udp -m udp --sport 53 --dport 1024:65535 -j RETURN

-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags FIN,SYN,RST,ACK SYN -d 192.168.0.0/16
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags FIN,SYN,RST,ACK SYN -d 10.0.0.0/8
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p tcp -m tcp --tcp-flags FIN,SYN,RST,ACK SYN -d 172.16.0.0/12
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p udp -m udp --dport 0:32767 -d 192.168.0.0/16
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p udp -m udp --dport 0:32767 -d 10.0.0.0/8
-A DOCKER-USER -j ufw-docker-logging-deny -p udp -m udp --dport 0:32767 -d 172.16.0.0/12

-A DOCKER-USER -j RETURN

-A ufw-docker-logging-deny -m limit --limit 3/min --limit-burst 10 -j LOG --log-prefix "[UFW DOCKER BLOCK] "
-A ufw-docker-logging-deny -j DROP

COMMIT
# END UFW AND DOCKER

Here the source.

Docker and UFW don't work together too well as they both modify iptables but there's a way to fix this. You'll need to configure Docker to not use iptables. Add

DOCKER_OPTS="--iptables=false"

to /etc/default/docker and restart your host (or restart the Docker daemon and UFW).

These two links have a lot more information about the issue:

https://blog.viktorpetersson.com/2014/11/03/the-dangers-of-ufw-docker.html
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-fix-the-docker-and-ufw-security-flaw/