Declare secured connector on Tomcat for https connections

To access your tomcat threw https, you have to declare a secured connector. There are two parts to do that :


  1. modify your server.xml with the new connector configuration
  2. generate a java keystore the connector will refer to

Step 1 : Modify your serveur.xml like this


<Connector
           protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"
           port="${ssl.port}" maxThreads="200"
           scheme="https" secure="true" SSLEnabled="true"
           keystoreFile="${java.home}/lib/security/tomcat_java.keystore" keystorePass="changeit"
           clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLSv1.1" ciphers="TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256,
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA,
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384,
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA,
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA,
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256,
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA,
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256,
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA,
SSL_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA" />

Step 2 : generate the keystore which contains the certificate used to secure connections

To generate your keystore, you need openssl and keytool (%JAVA_HOME%/jre/bin/keytool). 

If you use an existing certificate in PEM format (cer or pem files) , you will need to convert it to PKCS#12 format (p12 file). To acheive that, you need :
  • your private key which was used to generate the certificate
  • your certificate
  • the root certificate form your Certificate Authority (Verisign, GoDaddy, Symantec, etc...)

Convert it with :

openssl pkcs12 -export -in [your_certificate].cer -inkey [your private key].key -out result-certificate.p12 -name tomcat -CAfile [Veridign certificate].cer -caname root

Then generate your keystore (NOTE -->  'tomcat' alias is important) :

keytool -importkeystore -deststorepass changeit -destkeypass changeit -destkeystore tomcat_java.keystore -srckeystore result-certificate.p12 -srcstoretype PKCS12 -srcstorepass changeit -alias tomcat

Restart Tomcat and check logs to see if connector is started.


PS : many thanks to John Willis. His post (http://www.johnwillis.com/2015/07/tomcat-errsslversionorciphermismatch.html) really helped me.