How to get rid of port numbers from my URL's?

Neal Culiner
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November 9, 2013

Hello,

Thank you for JIRA and Confluence, absolutely amazing tools I wish I would have stumbled upon years earlier! We have been using JIRA and related tools for a few weeks now and you have brought my developers to life! Previously, it was hard managing the cases...long story short, JIRA has been amazing.

I look forward to also making our Confluence site our hub for documentation, teams, and more. With all that said, I am not a fan of using port numbers in the URL's, for us devs it's fine, to our non techy users it may confuse or concern them. I'm using Windows Server 2008 R2 on all of my servers and I realize that having IIS on these servers is part of the cause. I tried the IIS integrations but things didn't work such as popup dialogs in JIRA so I abandoned the IIS integrations.

As we are with JIRA and tools for life, we love them, I want to figure out how to get setup such that I can do away with port numbers. While I'm not knowledgable in Linux, I can put CentOS on one of the servers and move all of the Atlassian products to this server if that would solve this problem. I'm not sure if the problem would remain there too but I'm not knowledgable with CentOS/*nix on how this would work.

If anyone could help in getting a configuration devised such that I can enjoy URL's such as jira.domain.com and wiki.domain.com and fisheye.domain.com without port assignments this would be great.

Thank you.

P.S. If there is a way to do this on Windows that would be ideal, even if removing IIS was needed as I do prefer what I know (Windows), and the Windows GUI

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Neal Culiner
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January 25, 2014

I finally was able to get my jira and confluence setup without the need for ports and think all of the suggestions such as routing throught IIS are the wrong approach when it is really quite simple. In fact I suggest Atlassian do away with the articles about using IIS as it's just not needed and discouraged in my opinion.

Tomcat is its own web server and can work just fine along side IIS in Windows. In windows configure your "iplisten" ip addresses for IIS to bind to so that it does not conflict with Tomcat. Then configure your server.xml file assigning a specific ip address in the connector using the address="your ip here" element, changing the port from 8080 or 8090 to just 80. Then add an <Alias>your domain here</Alias> in the appropriate location for the host config area. All works great.

The approaches I've researched and countless hours spent using IIS 7's routing and redirect modules, etc. etc. just never worked right and come to find out were never needed. It is much easier than you think. I hope this helps others that want to do away with the crazy 8080 and 8090 ports of which some of my staff that sometimes travel and connect through hotel ISP's that don't allow this traffic as they lock to only basic ports (80, 443, 25, 587, 110, etc.).

FYI

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 25, 2014

No, the suggestions for using IIS or Apache etc are all useful for assorted reasons.

It does sound like you've hit the case where you probably don't need it (servers only running one application, on their own, no integration with other applications in terms of url consistency, no load balancing, internal access control only, no access logging, and not exposed to the internet... and I'm pretty sure I've missed some) But most places do need to front applications with a gateway of some sort.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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November 9, 2013

This is always going to be a general networking question because the applications always accept connections on a port.

There are three basic approaches here -

  • Make the applications run on a generic port that clients will make assumptions about (for example, if you run it on port 80, that's the standard for http, which most browsers assume and hide from the user)
  • Set up your network to translate it - set up your internal DNS so that "http://ourjiraserver:8080 is used when a user puts in http://ourjiraserver
  • Run a webserver application in front of it, and tell that to connect to the local service when someone lands on your chosen url. Apache, Nginx, IIS, all frequently used to do this. It's got all sorts of benefits on top of url naming and is the most common way to do it.

Personally, in your case, I'd work through the issues with IIS, as that seems the most familiar to you. I think we'd need to look at the problems you've had with IIS first - maybe post more detail here?

pro safe January 23, 2019

Hi Nic,

Please can you tell me how to do option 2?

Best,

Gary

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 23, 2019

That's a question for your networking team, I can't begin to tell you as I have no knowledge of how your network currently does DNS (nor do I do it this way, so even if I did know your network, I have little knowledge of DNS servers)

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Neal Culiner
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November 9, 2013

This link is what I used and it works great! Far better solution that the tomcat redirect option. I hope Atlassian will integrate this into their docs as a preferred method if using IIS 7 or later.

http://willhughes.me/20100112/jira-fisheye-and-iis7-using-application-request-routing/

http://n8v.enteuxis.org/2010/07/convincing-iis7-to-accept-urls-containing-plusses/

Neal Culiner
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November 10, 2013

I marked this question as unanswered, I tried both the Atlassian docs on IIS integration as well as the links I posted above - they both do the exact same thing. The links I posted is much easier to config for those interested.

However, I had issues when port numbers were not used. Application navigator and links were not working properly. Add-ons such as team calendars stopped working. Trying to add application links did not work.

I would like to find a way that I can have URL's without port numbers even if that means moving to CentOS if there is a better solution. I'm not a fan of links with ports to the non-techies that don't understand this and may be concerned about it. For those that are tech savvy it's still just a bad thing.

How can I, like Atlassian, have my links to the various Atlassian products without ports?

Thank you.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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November 10, 2013

The links you've posted are good, but I've not had any problem doing this with IIS following Atlassian's instructions.

I'm afraid we can't help you without knowing what you've done. A lot of sites have Atlassian products working fine without port numbers and using IIS, but we simply don't know where you're stuck

Like Ahmed Ayoub likes this
Neal Culiner
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November 10, 2013

I used both the Atlassian way and the IIS way, both had identical issues. I could not manage application links, I could not add the user directory back, I could not get Team Calendar to work in Confluence as it couldn't find JIRA. I got "internal server error" messages but didn't know where to find them. While I think "most" of it works with the portless config there is some functionality affected as far as I can tell. For this reason I can't use it.

If you're using just one thing such as JIRA or Confluence, it's probably fine, but the problem is getting the two to work together in this mode is the issue.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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November 10, 2013

Ok, so let's look at one of those issues - pick one that consistently causes an "internal server error" and then provoke it again. Then look in the log file for an error at the time you clicked (which will be long and cryptic, but may tell us what the problem is, or at least where to look next)

Have a look at the "system information" page, that should tell you where the logs are located.

Neal Culiner
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November 10, 2013

I did check teh log at the time, didn't see anything, maybe the logging level was insufficient. Right now everything is back to using ports again, I spent 8+ hours of my Sunday on this so I'm leaving it for now. I appreciate your help though. Just curious if there is anyone that may have crossed this issue or can reproduce it. Ideally, again, I'd love to have URL's with no ports and let all port use be internal behind the firewall, etc.

Ahmed Ayoub December 20, 2018

Hello Nic,

you've said:

The links you've posted are good, but I've not had any problem doing this with IIS following Atlassian's instructions.

can you please direct me to the offical atlassian instruction regarding this matter. i have looked but wasn't able to.

 

thanks,

Ahmed

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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December 20, 2018

This is a very old question, and the links are probably out of date.  But have a look for the application you're interested in and IIS in the docs, and you should find the current versions.

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