Getting started with the Webdock Web Application Firewall
Last updated: July 8th 2025
Introduction
The Webdock Web Application Firewall - Powered by Blackwall Gatekeeper - is an on-premise Web Application Firewall solution where you can easily enable advanced L7 DDOS and Bot protection for your domains. Furthermore, Gatekeeper will offload SSL Certificates so you don't have to worry about renewals as well as cache content for you at the edge for faster page loads.
Getting Started with the WAF
To get started, simply fill out the form with all the required details. Once you hit submit, your WAF will be created and will start setup once you update your DNS records, as shown on-screen.
In order to use the WAF you should have an understanding of how DNS records work and how a software Web Application Firewall is supposed to work as there are a lot of implementation details which rely on your upstream server responding properly to requests, as well as your domain DNS being correctly configured. If you feel you have set everything up correctly and you have any issues, feel free to contact Webdock Support and we will try and assist you any way we can.
You can manually enter ports if you toggle to the manual input mode for your upstream server. Here you can enter any port in the format ipv4:port e.g. 65.65.45.65:8080 - just make sure you choose the appropriate communication protocol for the port, that is whether it responds with SSL encryption or plain HTTP.
What to do if WAF setup doesn't complete in a timely manner
Depends, if it's SSL Certificate generation, you should allow at most 24 hours for the certificate to finalize, as you may have hit rate limits at Let's Encrypt for your domain which should clear within a 24 hour window.
In almost all other cases, if you do not see your WAF in a functional state once DNS records have been added and verified, you should as the very first thing try to just edit your WAF and hit the Update button, in order to force a reload of all your settings in the WAF Gatekeeper cluster. If this does not resolve a hanging setup status, you should reach out to Webdock support for further troubleshooting.
