how to auto redirect from 8080 port to 8443

Question

I am using Ubuntu 14.04 and apache-tomcat version 6. I changed all necessary things to redirect the port from 8080 to 8443 and it's working fine, but the thing is both urls are working. I would like to auto redirect to 8443(https://localhost:8443) when we open 8080 (http://localhost:8080) and is there any free SSL CA(certificate authority) available to encrypt the data among server and user.

Answer 1

Tomcat 6.0 is obsolete, so I'll assume you have at least Tomcat 7 (which is available on Ubuntu 14.04). There are basically three ways to force a redirect to HTTPS:

• Add a <security-contraint> to the web.xml files of all your application. If they don't have any, add:

<security-constraint>
    <web-resource-collection>
        <web-resource-name>All</web-resource-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </web-resource-collection>
    <user-data-constraint>
        <transport-guarantee>CONFIDENTIAL</transport-guarantee>
    </user-data-constraint>
</security-constraint>

otherwise add the <user-data-constraint> part to the existing <security-constraint>.

You can also add the previous snippet to conf/web.xml, but that may have side-effects: security constraints are selected by the most specific URL pattern. If they have the same URL pattern they are merged: the less restrictive contraint applies. E.g. if you use the /html/* pattern in conf/web.xml it will be merged with Tomcat Manager's contraint and you will be able to log into Tomcat Manager without encryption and without password.

• You can use a RewriteValve: see this question for Tomcat 7 or this question for more recent versions.
• Personally I'd recommend to use a reverse proxy like Nginx and to perform the redirect on it, rather than Tomcat. There are lot of questions and answers on this site on how to do it.