Table of Contents

Configuring and setting up Tomcat

Intro

Conventions used in this document

CATALINA_HOME refers to the path of your Tomcat installation. In Unix, you should refer it as $CATALINA_HOME, while in Windows it will be referred as %CATALINA_HOME%.

Security

Disable AJP if you aren't going to use through apache

AJP it's a protocol to connect Apache with a Java Application Server, like Tomcat.

If you don't plan to use Apache in front of Tomcat, disable AJP. Open the CATALINA_HOmE/conf/server.xml file and disable this line:

    <!-- Define an AJP 1.3 Connector on port 8009 -->
    <!-- Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" / -->

Disable autodeploy if you are going to use Tomcat in a production environment

Autodeploy means that every web application created under CATALINA_HOME/webapps is automatically deployed; every JSP compiled, etc. This is not necessary for production sites for two reasons: 1) it burdens the load of Tomcat checking every X seconds if new content has dropped and 2) it could be potentially dangerous if a hacker can put new content into this directory.

To disable it, open CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml and locate this:

      <Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps"
            unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">

and put a false in the attributes unpackWARs and autoDeploy:

      <Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps"
            unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="false">

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