How to enable port 80 on Apache tomcat?

Heya,

To make your Tomcat application available on port 80, you have several options:

1. Reconfigure Tomcat to Listen on Port 80 Directly:

• Open the server.xml file which is located in the conf directory of your Tomcat installation:

sudo nano /path/to/tomcat/conf/server.xml

• Find the line that starts with <Connector and has port="8080". Change 8080 to 80:

<Connector port="80" protocol="HTTP/1.1" ... />

• Save and close the file.
• Restart Tomcat.
• Note: Running Tomcat on ports below 1024 requires root privileges. Running Tomcat as root is not recommended due to potential security risks. Hence, the below methods might be more suitable for most use cases.

2. Use a Reverse Proxy (e.g., Apache or Nginx):

This method involves setting up another web server in front of Tomcat to handle incoming requests on port 80 and then forward them to Tomcat on port 8080.

• For example, with Nginx, you would install Nginx and then set up a configuration like:

server {
    listen 80;
    
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    }
}

• Reload or restart Nginx after modifying the configuration.

This approach has the added benefit of allowing you to easily set up SSL/TLS encryption, load balance between multiple Tomcat instances, or serve static assets directly from the reverse proxy for better performance.

Hi there,

You should be able to do that by following these steps

• Edit the Tomcat server.xml configuration file, the locaiton of the file might depend on the way that you’ve installed Tomcat, but popular locations are at /opt/tomcat/conf/ or /etc/tomcatVERSION
• After that find the <Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" line, and change the port from 8080 to 80
• Finally restart Tomcat

Let me know how it goes!

Best,

Bobby

Hello @sergeigerman,

To change default port number, edit the main Connector element in the server.xml file. Find XML tag that looks something like this:

<!-- Define a non-SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8080 -->
<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
           connectionTimeout="20000"
           redirectPort="8443" />

Just change the port attribute from 8080 to 80, and restart Tomcat. Unless that port number is already in use or you lack administrative permission to start a server on port 80, Tomcat should now be operational on port 80.

Let me know how it goes,

Sergio Turpín