Shibboleth and Liferay Part 4: Configuring Tomcat

This is part 4 of a set of blog posts detailing the setup to have Shibboleth provide Web SSO for Liferay.

By this point you've installed Shibboleth, configured Apache and setup your connector between Apache and Tomcat.

Notice, in the last blog post, that we set the port for the AJP connector to port 8009. You're going to need to tell Tomcat to listen on that port. Open up your [Tomcat Home]/conf/server.xml file. About halfway through the file you'll see a few <Connector> tags that define the ports Tomcat is set to listen to. Usually the connector for port 8009 is available by default, which is fine, but notice there's a setting in it: "redirectPort="8443" that redirects any request on port 8009 to 8443... But by default, the Connector for port 8443 is commented out. Go figure.

First, add the following setting to the Connector for port 8009:

tomcatAuthentication="false"

Next, uncomment the Connector tag and settings for port 8443. You'll also need to add the keystoreFile setting to point to the location of your SSL Certificate keystore, as well as the keystorePass. If you created your own self-signed certificate for testing, then you know these values. Otherwise you will need to obtain them from whomever set it up.