JBoss Port Renumbering

07 April 2006, Charles Roth
25 April 2008, updated with note about JBoss 5.0.

JBoss 4 is a very powerful, open-source, Java application server.  JBoss at Work is an otherwise excellent introduction to JBoss, with one teensy little annoyance...

...that is the reason for this page.  Specifically, when it describes installing and starting JBoss, it says:

"If you don't see any exceptions scroll by, JBoss is up and running when you see the final line: Started in xx ms. To stop JBoss, press ctrl+C.

Now that we're sure that everything runs, let's explore JBoss a bit more closely."

And if you do see any exceptions, what should you do?  Sing a verse or two of Titwillow?

Seriously folks, the most common problem one is likely to encounter when installing JBoss on a working server, is a port-number collision.  JBoss is not particularly helpful about telling you which port numbers were already in use, what they are for, and how you can change them.  Hence, this page.

The following refers to JBoss version 4.03, for the "default" set of services.  All file references are relative to $JBOSS_HOME/server/default.  Be careful -- a given parameter may appear multiple times in a single file, make sure you catch all of them.  I've shown an example set of new port numbers, but the actual choices are up to you.  As usual, your mileage may vary.

File	Service	What	Parameter	Port	New Port
deploy/http-invoker.sar/META-INF/jboss-service.xml	Tomcat		InvokerURLSuffix	8080	11080
deploy/jboss-ws4ee.sar/META-INF/jboss-service.xml	Tomcat		WebServicePort	8080	11080
			WebServiceSecurePort	8443	11443
deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/server.xml	Tomcat	HTTP	port	8080	11080
		HTTP	redirectPort	8443	11443
		AJP	port	8009	11009
		SSL	port	8443	11443
conf/jboss-service.xml	JBoss	WebService	Port	8080	11080
		Naming	Port	1099	11099
		Naming	RmiPort	1098	11098
		invoker,type=jrmp	RMIObjectPort	4444	14444
		invoker,type=pooled	ServerBindPort	4445	14445
deploy/jms/uil2-service.xml	JMS		ServerBindPort	1093	11093
deploy/hsqldb-ds.xml	HSQLDB	Hypersonic	Port	1701	11701
deploy/cache-invalidation-service.xml			ProviderUrl	1099	11099

The above information was gained the hard way -- by 'grep'ing through all the .xml files for things that looked like port numbers, and trying it all on a server that already had multiple instances of Tomcat, Apache, other java app servers, etc.  There is some additional info on the JBoss wiki, at wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=ConfigurePorts

Any feedback is most welcome (roth@thedance.net).  Good luck!

Footnote: As of April 2008, Dennis Kornbluh wrote in to say that most of this information still seems to be accurate for JBoss-5.0.0.Beta4.  Thanks, Dennis!