Jetty/Howto/Secure Termination

Introduction

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You can start Jetty in a way that will require identification before a termination request is accepted. This can help safeguard against either accidental or malicious terminations.

Steps

In order to protect you Jetty instance from unwanted termination you need to start Jetty with a *STOP.PORT* parameter:

java -DSTOP.PORT=8079 -jar start.jar

The *STOP.PORT* is the number of a port on which Jetty will listen for termination requests. In this case, the port number is 8079. You can then stop jetty either with a Template:Cntrl-c in the controlling terminal window (unless you have disassociated the Jetty process from a terminal), or by supplying this port number on a stop request from any terminal.

You can also supply a secret key on startup which must also be present on the termination request to enhance security:

java -DSTOP.PORT=8079 -DSTOP.KEY=mysecret -jar start.jar

In some operating systems your STOP.KEY may be visible in the process list, allowing other users to connect to the stop port and initiate the stop command. Please consider this before using the STOP.PORT and STOP.KEY in start/stop scripts, for example init.d scripts on linux distributions.

As a further security measure, you can omit the *STOP.KEY* property on startup, in which case Jetty will generate and print on stdout a random key:

> java -DSTOP.PORT=8079 -jar start.jar
-DSTOP.KEY=3xspihnnsse8 

This key should then be supplied on the termination request:

java -DSTOP.PORT=8079 -DSTOP.KEY=3xspihnnsse8 -jar start.jar --stop