Alright, that’s a confusing title.

Anyway, the point of this is to show you how to setup Tomcat 8 on Debian 8 (Jessie), and to have it bind to port 80.  This uses just the default packages from Debian, so if you are using a version of Tomcat that you downloaded directly from their website you may be out of luck.

First, install the needed packages(note: this causes Tomcat to start automatically):

$ apt-get install tomcat8 authbind

Now, we need to change the configuration settings for Tomcat and authbind to make sure that they work properly.

1. Edit /etc/default/tomcat8.  At the very end, there should be a line that says AUTHBIND=no.  Change this to say AUTHBIND=yes
2. Edit /etc/tomcat8/server.xml.  In this file, there is an XML tag that starts out with <Connector port=”8080″ ….  Change this to be 80.  There are two sections that you want to change this.
3. Go to /etc/authbind/byport.  Do the following(note: this assumes that tomcat is running as the tomcat8 user, which it will do if you installed it through apt)

   $ cd /etc/authbind/byport
   $ touch 80
   $ chown tomcat8 80
   $ chmod 744 80
   

4. Restart Tomcat

   $ systemctl restart tomcat8
   

You should now be able to access Tomcat on port 80.