Software engineering

Tomcat 7 listen on port 80 – Linux Debian

Posted onAuthorgeorgik

The default installation of Tomcat 7 for Linux Debian is listening on port 8080.

When you want to change the port to 80 then you have several options.

You can use iptables and redirect communication from port 8080 to port 80.

iptables -t nat -P PREROUTING -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080

The more straight forward approach is to bind Tomcat directly to port 80. First of all change port 8080 to 80 in file /etc/tomcat7/server.xml.

You’ll see error messages in /var/log/tomcat7/catalina.out when you try to restart Tomcat:

SEVERE: Failed to initialize connector [Connector[HTTP/1.1-80]]
org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to initialize component [Connector[HTTP/1.1-80]]
Caused by: java.net.BindException: Permission denied

The problem is that default installation of Tomcat 7 for Linux Debian allows to bind only ports higher than 1023. You need to allow binding to privileged ports.

Open file /etc/defaults/tomcat7 and change option from:

#AUTHBIND=no

to:

AUTHBIND=yes

Restart Tomcat and it will listen on port 80.

6 Replies to “Tomcat 7 listen on port 80 – Linux Debian”

  1. My God! It worked.

    But, before I did this (I don’t know where I got it):

    Install authbind
    Make port 80 available to authbind (you need to be root):
    touch /etc/authbind/byport/80
    chmod 500 /etc/authbind/byport/80
    Make IPv4 the default (authbind does not currently support IPv6). To do so, create the file
    TOMCAT_HOME/bin/setenv.sh
    with the following content:
    CATALINA_OPTS=”-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true”
    Change startup.sh:
    exec authbind –deep “$PRGDIR”/”$EXECUTABLE” start “$@”
    # OLD: exec “$PRGDIR”/”$EXECUTABLE” start “$@”

    The Web site: http://www.guardalar.com

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