Apache Tomcat 8 Configuration Reference

A boolean value which can be used to enable or disable the TRACE HTTP method. If not specified, this attribute is set to false.

The default timeout for asynchronous requests in milliseconds. If not specified, this attribute is set to the Servlet specification default of 30000 (30 seconds).

A boolean value which can be used to enable or disable the recycling of the facade objects that isolate the container internal request processing objects. If set to true the facades will be set for garbage collection after every request, otherwise they will be reused. This setting has no effect when the security manager is enabled. If not specified, this attribute is set to the value of the org.apache.catalina.connector.RECYCLE_FACADES system property, or false if not set.

Set to true if you want calls to request.getRemoteHost() to perform DNS lookups in order to return the actual host name of the remote client. Set to false to skip the DNS lookup and return the IP address in String form instead (thereby improving performance). By default, DNS lookups are disabled.

When set to reject request paths containing a %2f sequence will be rejected with a 400 response. When set to decode request paths containing a %2f sequence will have that sequence decoded to / at the same time other %nn sequences are decoded. When set to passthrough request paths containing a %2f sequence will be processed with the %2f sequence unchanged. If not specified the default value is reject. This default may be modified if the deprecated system property org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH is set.

The maximum number of cookies that are permitted for a request. A value of less than zero means no limit. If not specified, a default value of 200 will be used.

The maximum number of parameter and value pairs (GET plus POST) which will be automatically parsed by the container. Parameter and value pairs beyond this limit will be ignored. A value of less than 0 means no limit. If not specified, a default of 10000 is used. Note that FailedRequestFilter filter can be used to reject requests that hit the limit.

The maximum size in bytes of the POST which will be handled by the container FORM URL parameter parsing. The limit can be disabled by setting this attribute to a value less than zero. If not specified, this attribute is set to 2097152 (2 megabytes). Note that the FailedRequestFilter can be used to reject requests that exceed this limit.

The maximum size in bytes of the request body which will be saved/buffered by the container during FORM or CLIENT-CERT authentication or during HTTP/1.1 upgrade. For both types of authentication, the request body will be saved/buffered before the user is authenticated. For CLIENT-CERT authentication, the request body is buffered for the duration of the SSL handshake and the buffer emptied when the request is processed. For FORM authentication the POST is saved whilst the user is re-directed to the login form and is retained until the user successfully authenticates or the session associated with the authentication request expires. For HTTP/1.1 upgrade, the request body is buffered for the duration of the upgrade process. The limit can be disabled by setting this attribute to -1. Setting the attribute to zero will disable the saving of the requets body data during authentication and HTTP/1.1 upgrade. If not specified, this attribute is set to 4096 (4 kilobytes).

A comma-separated list of HTTP methods for which request bodies using application/x-www-form-urlencoded will be parsed for request parameters identically to POST. This is useful in RESTful applications that want to support POST-style semantics for PUT requests. Note that any setting other than POST causes Tomcat to behave in a way that goes against the intent of the servlet specification. The HTTP method TRACE is specifically forbidden here in accordance with the HTTP specification. The default is POST

The TCP port number on which this Connector will create a server socket and await incoming connections. Your operating system will allow only one server application to listen to a particular port number on a particular IP address. If the special value of 0 (zero) is used, then Tomcat will select a free port at random to use for this connector. This is typically only useful in embedded and testing applications.

Sets the protocol to handle incoming traffic. The default value is HTTP/1.1 which uses an auto-switching mechanism to select either a Java NIO based connector or an APR/native based connector. If the PATH (Windows) or LD_LIBRARY_PATH (on most unix systems) environment variables contain the Tomcat native library, and the AprLifecycleListener that is used to initialize APR has its useAprConnector attribute set to true, the APR/native connector will be used. If the native library cannot be found or the attribute is not configured, the Java NIO based connector will be used. Note that the APR/native connector has different settings for HTTPS than the Java connectors.
To use an explicit protocol rather than rely on the auto-switching mechanism described above, the following values may be used:
org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol - non blocking Java NIO connector
org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Nio2Protocol - non blocking Java NIO2 connector
org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11AprProtocol - the APR/native connector.
Custom implementations may also be used.
Take a look at our Connector Comparison chart. The configuration for both Java connectors is identical, for http and https.
For more information on the APR connector and APR specific SSL settings please visit the APR documentation

If this Connector is being used in a proxy configuration, configure this attribute to specify the server name to be returned for calls to request.getServerName(). See Proxy Support for more information.

If this Connector is being used in a proxy configuration, configure this attribute to specify the server port to be returned for calls to request.getServerPort(). See Proxy Support for more information.

If this Connector is supporting non-SSL requests, and a request is received for which a matching <security-constraint> requires SSL transport, Catalina will automatically redirect the request to the port number specified here.

Set this attribute to the name of the protocol you wish to have returned by calls to request.getScheme(). For example, you would set this attribute to "https" for an SSL Connector. The default value is "http".

Set this attribute to true if you wish to have calls to request.isSecure() to return true for requests received by this Connector. You would want this on an SSL Connector or a non SSL connector that is receiving data from a SSL accelerator, like a crypto card, an SSL appliance or even a webserver. The default value is false.

This specifies the character encoding used to decode the URI bytes, after %xx decoding the URL. If not specified, UTF-8 will be used unless the org.apache.catalina.STRICT_SERVLET_COMPLIANCE system property is set to true in which case ISO-8859-1 will be used.

This specifies if the encoding specified in contentType should be used for URI query parameters, instead of using the URIEncoding. This setting is present for compatibility with Tomcat 4.1.x, where the encoding specified in the contentType, or explicitly set using Request.setCharacterEncoding method was also used for the parameters from the URL. The default value is false.

Notes: 1) This setting is applied only to the query string of a request. Unlike URIEncoding it does not affect the path portion of a request URI. 2) If request character encoding is not known (is not provided by a browser and is not set by SetCharacterEncodingFilter or a similar filter using Request.setCharacterEncoding method), the default encoding is always "ISO-8859-1". The URIEncoding setting has no effect on this default.

Set this attribute to true to cause Tomcat to use the IP address that the request was received on to determine the Host to send the request to. The default value is false.

Set this attribute to true to cause Tomcat to advertise support for the Servlet specification using the header recommended in the specification. The default value is false.

The maximum length of the operating system provided queue for incoming connection requests when maxConnections has been reached. The operating system may ignore this setting and use a different size for the queue. When this queue is full, the operating system may actively refuse additional connections or those connections may time out. The default value is 100.

The priority of the acceptor thread. The thread used to accept new connections. The default value is 5 (the value of the java.lang.Thread.NORM_PRIORITY constant). See the JavaDoc for the java.lang.Thread class for more details on what this priority means.

For servers with more than one IP address, this attribute specifies which address will be used for listening on the specified port. By default, the connector will listen all local addresses. Unless the JVM is configured otherwise using system properties, the Java based connectors (NIO, NIO2) will listen on both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses when configured with either 0.0.0.0 or ::. The APR/native connector will only listen on IPv4 addresses if configured with 0.0.0.0 and will listen on IPv6 addresses (and optionally IPv4 addresses depending on the setting of ipv6v6only) if configured with ::.

By default Tomcat will allow requests that specify a host in the request line but specify a different host in the host header. This check can be enabled by setting this attribute to false. If not specified, the default is true.

By default Tomcat will ignore all trailer headers when processing chunked input. For a header to be processed, it must be added to this comma-separated list of header names.

Controls when the socket used by the connector is bound. By default it is bound when the connector is initiated and unbound when the connector is destroyed. If set to false, the socket will be bound when the connector is started and unbound when it is stopped.

When client certificate information is presented in a form other than instances of java.security.cert.X509Certificate it needs to be converted before it can be used and this property controls which JSSE provider is used to perform the conversion. For example it is used with the AJP connectors, the HTTP APR connector and with the org.apache.catalina.valves.SSLValve. If not specified, the default provider will be used.

The value is a comma separated list of MIME types for which HTTP compression may be used. The default value is text/html,text/xml,text/plain,text/css,text/javascript,application/javascript,application/json,application/xml . If you specify a type explicitly, the default is over-ridden.

The Connector may use HTTP/1.1 GZIP compression in an attempt to save server bandwidth. The acceptable values for the parameter is "off" (disable compression), "on" (allow compression, which causes text data to be compressed), "force" (forces compression in all cases), or a numerical integer value (which is equivalent to "on", but specifies the minimum amount of data before the output is compressed). If the content-length is not known and compression is set to "on" or more aggressive, the output will also be compressed. If not specified, this attribute is set to "off".

Note: There is a tradeoff between using compression (saving your bandwidth) and using the sendfile feature (saving your CPU cycles). If the connector supports the sendfile feature, e.g. the NIO connector, using sendfile will take precedence over compression. The symptoms will be that static files greater that 48 Kb will be sent uncompressed. You can turn off sendfile by setting useSendfile attribute of the connector, as documented below, or change the sendfile usage threshold in the configuration of the DefaultServlet in the default conf/web.xml or in the web.xml of your web application.

If compression is set to "on" then this attribute may be used to specify the minimum amount of data before the output is compressed. If not specified, this attribute is defaults to "2048". Units are in bytes.

The number of seconds during which the sockets used by this Connector will linger when they are closed. The default value is -1 which disables socket linger.

The number of milliseconds this Connector will wait, after accepting a connection, for the request URI line to be presented. Use a value of -1 to indicate no (i.e. infinite) timeout. The default value is 60000 (i.e. 60 seconds) but note that the standard server.xml that ships with Tomcat sets this to 20000 (i.e. 20 seconds). Unless disableUploadTimeout is set to false, this timeout will also be used when reading the request body (if any).

Specifies the timeout, in milliseconds, to use while a data upload is in progress. This only takes effect if disableUploadTimeout is set to false.

When to respond with a 100 intermediate response code to a request containing an Expect: 100-continue header. The following values may used:

• immediately - an intermediate 100 status response will be returned as soon as practical
• onRead - an intermediate 100 status response will be returned only when the Servlet reads the request body, allowing the servlet to inspect the headers and possibly respond before the user agent sends a possibly large request body.

The name of the default SSLHostConfig that will be used for secure connections (if this connector is configured for secure connections) if the client connection does not provide SNI or if the SNI is provided but does not match any configured SSLHostConfig. If not specified the default value of _default_ will be used. Provided values are always converted to lower case.

This flag allows the servlet container to use a different, usually longer connection timeout during data upload. If not specified, this attribute is set to true which disables this longer timeout.

A reference to the name in an Executor element. If this attribute is set, and the named executor exists, the connector will use the executor, and all the other thread attributes will be ignored. Note that if a shared executor is not specified for a connector then the connector will use a private, internal executor to provide the thread pool.

The time that the private internal executor will wait for request processing threads to terminate before continuing with the process of stopping the connector. If not set, the default is 5000 (5 seconds).

The number of milliseconds this Connector will wait for another HTTP request before closing the connection. The default value is to use the value that has been set for the connectionTimeout attribute. Use a value of -1 to indicate no (i.e. infinite) timeout.

The maximum number of connections that the server will accept and process at any given time. When this number has been reached, the server will accept, but not process, one further connection. This additional connection be blocked until the number of connections being processed falls below maxConnections at which point the server will start accepting and processing new connections again. Note that once the limit has been reached, the operating system may still accept connections based on the acceptCount setting. The default value varies by connector type. For NIO and NIO2 the default is 10000. For APR/native, the default is 8192.

For NIO/NIO2 only, setting the value to -1, will disable the maxConnections feature and connections will not be counted.

Limits the total length of chunk extensions in chunked HTTP requests. If the value is -1, no limit will be imposed. If not specified, the default value of 8192 will be used.

The maximum number of headers in a request that are allowed by the container. A request that contains more headers than the specified limit will be rejected. A value of less than 0 means no limit. If not specified, a default of 100 is used.

Provides the default value for maxHttpRequestHeaderSize and maxHttpResponseHeaderSize. If not specified, this attribute is set to 8192 (8 KB).

The maximum permitted size of the request line and headers associated with an HTTP request, specified in bytes. This is compared to the number of bytes received so includes line terminators and whitespace as well as the request line, header names and header values. If not specified, this attribute is set to the value of the maxHttpHeaderSize attribute.

The maximum permitted size of the response line and headers associated with an HTTP response, specified in bytes. This is compared to the number of bytes written so includes line term