How to change the port of Tomcat from 8080 to 80?

Question

1) Go to conf folder in tomcat installation directory

 e.g. C:\Tomcat 6.0\conf\

2) Edit following tag in server.xml file

<Connector connectionTimeout="20000" port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" redirectPort="8443"/>

3) Change the port=8080 value to port=80

4) Save file.

5) Stop your Tomcat and restart it.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, in Amazon EC2. The following steps resolved this issue for me:

1. Edit server.xml and change port="8080" to "80"

sudo vi /var/lib/tomcat7/conf/server.xml

<Connector connectionTimeout="20000" port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" redirectPort="8443"/>

2. Edit tomcat7 file (if the file is not created then you need to create it)

sudo vi /etc/default/tomcat7

uncomment and change #AUTHBIND=no to yes

3. Install authbind

sudo apt-get install authbind

4. Run the following commands to provide tomcat7 read+execute on port 80.

sudo touch /etc/authbind/byport/80
sudo chmod 500 /etc/authbind/byport/80
sudo chown tomcat7 /etc/authbind/byport/80

5. Restart tomcat:

sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat7 restart

On a Linux Debian-based (so Ubuntu included) you have also to go to /etc/default/tomcat7, uncomment the #AUTHBIND=no line and set its value to 'yes', in order to let the server bind on a privileged port.

On Ubuntu and Debian systems, there are several steps needed:

1. In server.xml, change the line <Connector connectionTimeout="20000" port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" redirectPort="8443"/> to have port="80".

2. Install the recommended (not required) authbind package, with a command like:

   sudo apt-get install authbind

3. Enable authbind in the server.xml file (in either /etc/tomcat6 or /etc/tomcat7) by uncommenting and setting the line like:

   AUTHBIND=yes

All three steps are needed.

I tried changing the port from 8080 to 80 in the server.xml but it didn't work for me. Then I found alternative, update the iptables which i'm sure there is an impact on performance.

I use the following commands:

sudo /sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080
sudo /sbin/service iptables save

http://www.excelsior-usa.com/articles/tomcat-amazon-ec2-advanced.html#port80

As previous answers didn't work well (it was good, but not enough) for me on a 14.04 Ubuntu Server, I mention these recommendations (this is a quote).

Edit: note that as @jason-faust mentioned it in the comments, on 14.04, the authbind package that ships with it does support IPv6 now, so the prefer IPv4 thing isn't needed any longer.

1) Install authbind
2) Make port 80 available to authbind (you need to be root):

  touch /etc/authbind/byport/80
  chmod 500 /etc/authbind/byport/80
  chown tomcat7 /etc/authbind/byport/80

3) Make IPv4 the default (authbind does not currently support IPv6).
   To do so, create the file TOMCAT/bin/setenv.sh with the following content: 

   CATALINA_OPTS="-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true"

4) Change /usr/share/tomcat7/bin/startup.sh

  exec authbind --deep "$PRGDIR"/"$EXECUTABLE" start "$@"
  # OLD: exec "$PRGDIR"/"$EXECUTABLE" start "$@"

If you already got a setenv.sh file in /usr/share/tomcat7/bin with CATALINA_OPTS, you have to use :

export CATALINA_OPTS="$CATALINA_OPTS -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true"

Now you can change the port to 80 as told in other answers.

On modern linux the best approach (for me) is to use xinetd :

1) create /etc/xinet.d/tomcat-http

service http
{
        disable = no
        socket_type = stream
        user = root
        wait = no
        redirect = 127.0.0.1 8080
}

2) create /etc/xinet.d/tomcat-https

service https
{
        disable = no
        socket_type = stream
        user = root
        wait = no
        redirect = 127.0.0.1 8443
}

3) chkconfig xinetd on

4) /etc/init.d/xinetd start