Always Crispy

If you want to serve pages from Tomcat over https, you are going to have to setup SSL in Tomcat. This is important if you are going to perform user authentication or serve sensitive data. 

Here are the steps you need to do to get SSL up and running on your Tomcat instance.

Steps 1: Create an certificate keystore. In lieu of buying a certificate, you can create a self signed one. You don’t really need to buy one unless you are going to be serving work related content from your Tomcat server. You can use the keytool utility that comes with the Java SDK in the bin directory. The command should look something like the one below:

keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA -keystore /path/to/my/keystore

Step 2: Update your server.xml to contain a connector similar to the one below. If you are working with the server.xml that is in the Tomcat tar ball, this tag should be commented out. Uncomment it and update the location of the keystoreFile path to where yours is located.

<Connector
           port="8443" maxThreads="200"
           scheme="https" secure="true" SSLEnabled="true"
           keystoreFile="/path/to/my/keystore" keystorePass="changeit"
           clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS"/>

References:
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/ssl-howto.html
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/ssl-howto.html