WAF Policy Editor - a Web-Based Tool to Configure a Declarative WAF Policy

Introduction

The declarative policy is a great step forward to unify WAF configuration across F5 WAFs. However, the policy format is JSON; easy for machines to deal with but not so easy for humans.
Currently, the process of putting together a declarative WAF policy requires a human to carefully read through tons of online documentation, figure out what features need to be enabled, and how each feature works. Once understood, the typical human will read one more time to examine configuration examples and then type out the JSON structure, without typos. Any typo may cause the WAF engine to reject a policy.

Not a terribly user-friendly procedure. The following project exists to address this kind of complexity.

The Project

WAF Policy Editor is a web-based tool that implements a UI to put together a declarative WAF policy. The basic concept is simple. Everything you configure in the UI will translate into a JSON file automatically and vice versa. The following screenshot gives an overview of the UI.

The menu ribbon at the very top lists all of the supported features. Input fields in the middle configure a policy.
The text area at the bottom represents the current policy state. The user is free to modify a policy via either input fields or directly in the JSON. Both representations are synchronized.

Another important aspect is that the policy editor continuously verifies policy validity and notifies a user if the configuration doesn't comply with a policy schema. For instance, the screenshot below informs a user that an application language field can only contain specific values.

The Workflows

There are few workflows for which this tool is designed.

The basic workflow is when a user configures a policy from scratch using the UI to set up desired features. Once done a policy can be simply either copied or downloaded as a file.

The second approach allows modifying an existing policy. It is similar to previous, however, once a user pastes an existing policy JSON to the text area it gets automatically translated to UI so a user can make desired modifications.

The last workflow allows to modify the existing policy as well but instead of pasting a policy a user can simply reference it as a query string parameter "ref". This is handy when a policy is located in a repository. Example link

Even though it is just a small community team working on this project it actively evolving. Every week new features arrive. If you find the project useful please give it a try and leave your feedback right to GitHub issues. Your feedback is critical in order to steer as many efforts as possible to the most voted features.