How to disable URL rewriting for tracking session in Tomcat

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

  • JBoss Web Server (JWS)
    • 1.x
    • 2.x
    • 3.x
  • Tomcat
    • 5.5
    • 6.0
    • 7.0

Issue

  • How to disable the use of URL rewriting for identifier to tracking session in Tomcat

Resolution

Tomcat 7.0

As per Servlet 3.0 spec, you can use setting in web.xml to configure session tracking mechanism. (COOKIE, URL and SSL can be specified). You can remove the jsessionid from URLs (= disabling URL rewriting) and use Cookie only for session tracking by the following example configuration:

<session-config>
  <tracking-mode>COOKIE</tracking-mode>
</session-config>

Tomcat 6.0

If you use Tomcat 6.0.30 onwards included in JWS 1.0.2 or later, you can disable support for URL rewriting, set "disableURLRewriting" attribute to true in your web application's META-INF/context.xml. This functionality is also included in RHEL 6.8's tomcat6-6.0.24-95 and later.

<Context disableURLRewriting='true' ..(snip).. >
    <!-- other settings -->
</Context>

If you use the older versions than Tomcat 6.0.30 or tomcat6-6.0.24-95 on RHEL 6.8, there's no configuration to disable URL rewriting. However, as workaround, you can remove the jsessionid from URLs by using custom servlet filter. Please refer to <https://access.redhat.com/solutions/16169> for details. Of course, this filter approach can also be used in Tomcat 6.0.30 onwards instead of the above setting.

Tomcat 5.5

As well as the older versions than Tomcat 6.0.30, there's no configuration in Tomcat 5.5. So, you can use custom servlet filter approach to remove the jsessionid from URLs . Please refer to <https://access.redhat.com/solutions/16169> for details.

Root Cause

This content is not included.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1221877

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