Can Tomcat reload its SSL certificate without being restarted?

I have a background process that can update the keystore Tomcat uses for its SSL credentials. I would like to be able to have Tomcat reload this automatically without needing a manual restart.

Is it possible to have Tomcat reload this without restarting, or is there a programmatic way that it could be done instead?

Solution 1:

I don't believe there is a way to do it automatically although your background process could restart tomcat automatically. The keystore only gets read once when the jvm is initialized. There might be a solution if you were to write your own handler that periodically re-checks the keystore but I personally haven't found any examples of this on the Internet.

Solution 2:

You can restart individual Tomcat connector i.e. port restart like 8443 is possible after you change your jssecacert file.

Here is the complete code/method that I am using to restart tomcat connectors after I add/delete certificates.

// Stop and restart the SSL connection so that the tomcat server will
// re-read the certificates from the truststore file.
public void refreshTrustStore() throws Exception 
{
    try 
    {
        //following line should be replaced based on where you get your port number. You may pass in as argument to this method
        String httpsPort = configurationManager.getHttpsPort();
        String objectString = "*:type=Connector,port=" + httpsPort + ",*";

        final ObjectName objectNameQuery = new ObjectName(objectString); 

        for (final MBeanServer server: MBeanServerFactory.findMBeanServer(null))
        {
            if (!server.queryNames(objectNameQuery, null).isEmpty())
            {
                MBeanServer mbeanServer = server;
                ObjectName objectName = (ObjectName) server.queryNames(objectNameQuery, null).toArray()[0];

                mbeanServer.invoke(objectName, "stop", null, null);

                // Polling sleep to reduce delay to safe minimum.
                // Use currentTimeMillis() over nanoTime() to avoid issues
                // with migrating threads across sleep() calls.
                long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
                // Maximum of 6 seconds, 3x time required on an idle system.
                long max_duration = 6000L;
                long duration = 0L;
                do
                {
                    try
                    {
                        Thread.sleep(100);
                    }
                    catch (InterruptedException e)
                    {
                        Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
                    }

                    duration = (System.currentTimeMillis() - start);
                } while (duration < max_duration &&
                        server.queryNames(objectNameQuery, null).size() > 0);

                // Use below to get more accurate metrics.
                String message = "TrustStoreManager TrustStore Stop: took " + duration + "milliseconds";
                logger.information(message);

                mbeanServer.invoke(objectName, "start", null, null);

                break;
            }
        }
    } 
    catch (Exception exception) 
    {
        // Log and throw exception
            throw exception
    }
}