@psmod2

If you setup ufw with a default policy to deny incoming connections and selectively add the ports that you want to allow incoming connections on, you shouldn’t need to be too specific or restrictive.

Before enabling ufw, running:

sudo ufw default deny

Sets a policy to deny all incoming connections. We then extend the rule set by allowing connection to ports 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS), and 22 (SSH).

sudo ufw allow 22/tcp \
&& sudo ufw allow 80/tcp \
&& sudo ufw allow 443/tcp

With those rules, only incoming connections on those ports will be permitted.

You really don’t want to disable incoming connections on Port 80. You should, instead, redirect those connections to Port 443 using a 301 or similar redirect. By blocking Port 80, you won’t be able to use redirects, so if someone visits:

http://yoursite.com

They aren’t going to see anything, instead, they’ll receive a failure to connect. What should happen is that when someone visits

http://yoursite.com

… they get redirected to https://yoursite.com.

That being said, the above rules will allow you to use apt-get, whether it’s to update, upgrade, install, remove or purge a package or multiple packages.

As far as CloudFlare goes, there’s no reason to specifically only allow connections from their IP’s or IP ranges. As long as SSL is properly setup and working, and you have your redirects in place, all connections will connect over SSL.

If you use a stateful firewall you will have no trouble with outgoing connections despite blocked ports.