Tomcat is a web server that serves web applications written in Java. Tomcat is a project of Apache Foundation and it is completely open source. You can use Tomcat for free. There are many web servers for running Java web applications such as Glassfish, JBoss etc. Tomcat is one of the most popular Java web server among them.
Your Java web application hosted on Tomcat server uses HTTP protocol by default. The communication between the client and the web server is not encrypted when HTTP protocol is used. So, it’s not secure.
These days, almost all the browsers will warn you when you try to visit HTTP links. It will even show you a red lock in the URL bar. If you want that green lock to appear in the URL bar when someone visits your Java web application hosted on Tomcat web server, you have to enable HTTPS on Tomcat. HTTPS is just the secured version of the HTTP protocol. When HTTPS is enabled, the communication between the client and the web server is encrypted.
An SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate is used to verify the ownership of the web server the client is connecting to using the HTTPS protocol. You normally buy an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority or CA such as Verisign, DigiCert etc and install it on your web server (in this case the Tomcat web server). You can also generate an SSL certificate yourself and install it on your Tomcat web server. Such certificates are called Self-Signed certificates.
In this article, I will show you how to generate your own SSL certificate or Self-Signed certificate and how to install it on Tomcat web server. Let’s get started.
Before you can install a SSL certificate on your Tomcat web server, you have to generate a Java KeyStore file or JKS file. When you install Apache Tomcat web server, all the required tools to generate a JKS keystore file is also installed. You can use the keytool utility to generate a JKS file on Linux…