This site is under construction and is both very incomplete and subject to change.
The current cannonical site for documentation is here.

Installation

  1. Ensure WP fail2ban is installed.
  2. Upload to your plugins directory.
  3. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
  4. Opt into Freemius; the blocklist will not work without without this.
  5. The Blocklist Network Service (BNS) uses the WordPress REST API to communicate. If there is another security plugin installed be sure it allows access to the blocklist endpoint:
  6. Important: ensure you set maxretry = 1 in your wordpress-hard or wordpress-blocklist-hard filter; the add-on will not work otherwise.

Optionally, if you want to use custom jails:

  1. Configure syslog to use a new file for one of the local facilities (local0...7).
  2. Configure WP fail2ban to use the local facility you chose.
  3. Configure fail2ban with new jails reading from the new syslog file using the new blocklist filters.
  4. Enable the “Custom Jail” option (or define WP_FAIL2BAN_ADDON_BLOCKLIST_CUSTOM_JAIL as true).