Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Changing the Port Number from 8080

Tomcat, in a default installation, is configured to listen on port 8080 rather than the conventional web server port number 80. This is sensible because the default port 80 is often in use already and because opening a network server socket listener on the default port 80 requires special privileges on Linux, Solaris, BSD, and other non-Windows operating systems. However, the majority of the time it still makes sense to run Tomcat on port 80 instead of the default 8080.

To change the port number, edit the main Connector element in the server.xml file. Find the 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.

Running a server on port 80 normally requires that it run with high administrative permissions, such as the root account on Linux, Solaris, BSD, and other non-Windows operating systems.

You (or your site security policies) may not want to trust Tomcat running as root, but we have not heard even a single reported incident where a machine's security was compromised because Tomcat was running as root. If you're worried about this, there are other ways of making Tomcat answer on port 80 without ...