Redirect HTTP and HTTPS traffic to Tomcat’s ports

Apache Tomcat likes with default settings to listen to requests on 8080 and 8443 ports but it is more enjoyable to use the more common 80 and 443 ports for HTTP and HTTPS traffic. This way the user don’t have to put those pesky port numbers after the address. Of course you could just tell Tomcat to listen to those ports but it has some negative sides: hassle with the startup and running Tomcat as root.

Luckily it is easy to tell the system to redirect the traffic from some port to other. Just define some new xinetd services in /etc/xinetd.d/tomcat.

# vim /etc/xinetd.d/tomcat

# Redirects any requests on port 80 to port 8080 (where Tomcat is listening)
service tomcat-http
{
        disable                 = no
        flags                   = REUSE
        wait                    = no
        user                    = root
        socket_type         = stream
        protocol                = tcp
        port                    = 80
        redirect                = localhost 8080
        log_on_success  -= PID HOST DURATION EXIT

        #per_source = UNLIMITED
        #instances = UNLIMITED
}

# Redirects any requests on port 443 to port 8443 (where Tomcat is listening)
service tomcat-https
{
        disable                 = no
        flags                   = REUSE
        wait                    = no
        user                    = root
        socket_type         = stream
        protocol                = tcp
        port                    = 443
        redirect                = localhost 8443
        log_on_success  -= PID HOST DURATION EXIT

        #per_source = UNLIMITED
        #instances = UNLIMITED
}

(via Securing Linux for Java services: The port dilemma)

Xinetd puts a connection limit per source IP, by default and this causes the service to become unresponsive when there are dozens of queries a second. You see the following kind of line in your messages log file: “xinetd[2049]: FAIL: tomcat-https per_source_limit from=123.456.789.123”. To correct this, uncomment the per_source and instances lines in your xinet.d file and restart it.

Also add those xinetd services to /etc/services.

# vim /etc/services
http        80/tcp     www www-http tomcat-http # WorldWideWeb http
http        80/udp     www www-http tomcat-http # WorldWideWeb HTTP
http        443/tcp    tomcat-https # WorldWideWeb HTTPS
http        443/udp    tomcat-https # WorldWideWeb HTTPS

And now just restart the xinetd and admire how your traffic is redirected to Tomcat’s ports.

# service xinetd restart

Force everything to transmit through HTTPS
If you also want to redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS you can add the following section to you Tomcat web.xml:

    Protected Context
    /*



    CONFIDENTIAL

If you are using this redirection of all traffic to HTTPS with JIRA and want to attachments working also with Internet Explorer then you must add the following to your jira.xml (f. ex. /opt/tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/jira.xml). This is a Internet Explorer bug, for more information see http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-8179.

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