Trouble changing Confluence to listen on port 80

[Jeffrey Filmore]

I have Confluence 6.8.3 installed on Linux Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server. Everything fine except, when I try to change the confluence listening port to 80 (from 8090), confluence will not load. I'm a bit baffled because I did seemingly the same steps in my test environment and port 80 worked like a charm. I basically change the connector port from 8090 to 80 as directed in the following article.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/change-listen-port-for-confluence-165823.html

From what I have gathered from searching google for a couple hours it's sounds like it could potentially be one of the following:

• port 80 is restricted from being used within Ubunu OS security kernel (though, In my researching this would be if you run confluence as user other than root, however I am running confluence as root user from what I can tell. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Running-Confluence-on-Port-80/qaq-p/219911
• Some other service is conflicting with port 80. Since this is a fresh install, I highly doubt this would be the issue.

One other thing I noticed was that confluence installed to a different directory on my test server. \home\atlassian\confluence as opposed to my production server installed to \opt\atlassian\confluence. Could this be the problem?

[Jeffrey Filmore · Accepted solution]

I figured it out. It was that confluence service was being started by user "confluence" rather than our designated admin account. All I had to do was change the user.sh file.as discussed in this article: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confkb/how-to-change-the-user-starting-confluence-with-start-confluence-sh-script-633439533.html

I guess the confluence user didn't have sufficient rights to use port 80

[AnnWorley]

Hi Jeffrey,

As you discovered, because of restricted ports in Linux, the confluence user most likely did not have access to port 80: Permission denied error when binding a port

Ports below 1024 are called Privileged Ports and in Linux (and most UNIX flavors and UNIX-like systems), they are not allowed to be opened by any non-root user. This is a security feature originally implemented as a way to prevent a malicious user from setting up a malicious service on a well-known service port.

I am happy you found a resolution that works for you. There are other approaches described in the article I linked above.

Thanks,

Ann