Serving Port 80 from 8080

Several times lately I’ve wanted to run a Jetty instance on port 8080 but have it available via port 80.

On Unix boxes, this usually involves running as root, or at least starting as root and dropping down to a lower-privileged user.

Given I wanted to quickly start/stop Jetty test instances from within Eclipse, I really wanted to keep running Jetty on 8080 but have it show up on 80.

What ended up being easiest for my Ubuntu 9.04 box was two firewall rules:

/etc/network/if-up.d/port80to8080:

#!/bin/sh
[ "$IFACE" != "lo" ] || exit 0;
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING --src 0/0 --dest 127.0.0.1 -p tcp --dport http -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080
iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT     --src 0/0 --dest 127.0.0.1 -p tcp --dport http -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080

/etc/network/if-down.d/port80to8080:

#!/bin/sh
[ "$IFACE" ! "lo" ] || exit 0;
iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING --src 0/0 --dest 127.0.0.1 -p tcp --dport http -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080
iptables -t nat -D OUTPUT     --src 0/0 --dest 127.0.0.1 -p tcp --dport http -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080

Make sure to chmod 744 and chown root:root both files.

These iptables rules catch all incoming (PREROUTING, others hitting your box) and outgoing (OUTPUT, you hitting your box) requests going to 127.0.0.1:80 and shunt it over to 8080.

I’m not enough of a sysadmin to know the pros/cons of using this approach in production, but for my dev box it works great.