Security Configs for Tomcat Applications

This instructions shows how to protect an application running on a Tomcat server in the platform. We recommend two possible solutions for restricting access to your app:

• request the user authentication
• deny the access for specified IP addresses

You can choose one of them or use both methods together.

Authentication

To set up the authentication in front of your web application deployed to Tomcat server, perform the following configurations:

1. Open the platform dashboard and click the Config button next to the Tomcat server in your environment.

2. Go to the /opt/tomcat/conf folder and double-click the tomcat-users.xml file in order to open it.
Use the following string format in order to specify new users' roles and credentials:

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<user username="test" password="test" roles="admin">

Save the changes made.

3. Then navigate to the web.xml file (it is contained in the same /opt/tomcat/conf folder) and specify the security constraint for the newly created user.

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<security-constraint>
<web-resource-collection>
  <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</web-resource-collection>
<auth-constraint>
  <role-name>admin</role-name>
  <role-name>user</role-name>
</auth-constraint>
</security-constraint>
<login-config>
<auth-method>BASIC</auth-method>
<realm-name>Test Realm</realm-name>
</login-config>

4. Don’t forget to Save the changes and Restart your Tomcat application server.

If you’ve done everything correctly, a user will meet the authentication window while trying to access the application.

Deny Client IP Addresses

In the case you would like to deny access to your web-application for particular client IP addresses, follow the next steps:

1. Press the Config button for the Tomcat app server in the environment with your application deployed.

2. Navigate to the /opt/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/META-INF folder and open the file named context.xml.

3. Enter the next strings in the context.xml file:

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<Context antiJARLocking="true" path="/">
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteIpValve" />
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve" deny="{IP_address}" />
</Context>

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<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteIpValve" />

4. Press the Save button and restart the Tomcat server.

After the configurations are set up, the user with a denied IP address will meet the HTTP Status 403 error while trying to access your application.