Configuring Confluence/Tomcat to respond to the network adaptor's IP address and to localhost:8090

[Cinzano Mosario]

Dear Community,

I'm hoping this question isn't too low level, however I'm kind of confused, somehow also  by a strange and old thread covering the topic here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/how-to-change-ip-address-of-confluence-server/qaq-p/8871

I'm running Confluence 6.13 as a service on a Windows 10 PC. Access via localhost:8090 works fine, I'm managing spaces and all that, no issues.

The point is that I want to access Confluence from several machines within the same network. The Confluence host PC has one network interface and the fixed IP address 192.168.178.36 assigned. All other machines do have corresponding IP addresses such as 192.168.178.32, 192.168.178.55 etc. I want to access Confluence from these other machines using 192.168.178.36:8090, and I'd like to keep the option to access Confluence on the Confluence host PC using localhost:8090.

Now, I understand I need to change the Server Base URL according to: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/configuring-the-server-base-url-148592.html

However I'm doubtful that this is really the right way, or the only thing to do? In the moment I change the Server Base URL, I would not be able to access Confluence via localhost:8090 anymore, and consequently the "Your URL doesn't match" warning is displayed. The gentlemen in the thread above seem to disagree on the idea of editing server.xml configuration file. Also, what I need to improve upon seems to be my Tomcat configuration skills, I assume. The Confluence admin docu is pretty silent about that except some hints on the Tomcat server memory configuration - however.

So my question is, isn't there a clean way to configure Confluence accordingly as envisioned above? Or is there any step-by-step page that I must have overlooked?

Thanks a lot for your kind consideration, and apologies if I'm asking a very noob question.

Best,
Richard

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The short answer is essentially "no". 

Confluence is located on one url and that's what you set the base url to.  It will work if you arrive by other routes, but you will find parts of it fail and a lot of the links within it will take you to the base url.  There's no way to have it run (properly) on an ip address and localhost.

So, change the base url to 192.168.178.36:8090 so that other computers can use it ok.  You'll still be able to get there on localhost:8090, but some things will fail, and you should really swap to using the base url. 

There is, in fact, no reason to bother using localhost, it has zero benefit over using the ip address.

The old question you found is rather strange, as it has someone pretending to know about computers and networking trying to answer the question with some really bad advice based on them really not understanding Tomcat, networking or computers.

[Cinzano Mosario]

Dear Nic, thanks a lot for your reply and your help - very helpful indeed! I understand changing the Server Base URL to the IP address of the Windows machine (including the port number) is the right thing to do, and nothing else such as editing the server.xml.

Thank you very much indeed again!

Cheers,
CM