Reverse proxy - iptables

The default Jenkins installation runs on ports 8080 and 8443. Typically, HTTP/HTTPS servers run on ports 80 and 443, respectively. But these ports are considered privileged on Unix/Linux systems, and the process using them must be owned by root. Running Jenkins as root is not recommended - it should be run as its own user. One solution is to front Jenkins with a web server such as Apache, and let it proxy requests to Jenkins, but this requires maintaining the Apache installation as well. In situations where you are wanting to run Jenkins on port 80 or 443 (i.e. HTTP/HTTPS), but you do not want to setup a proxy server you can use iptables on Linux to forward traffic.

Ubuntu Installations

Follow the Ubuntu installation instructions to install and configure the initial Jenkins installation on a supported version of Ubuntu. These instructions are known to not work on Ubuntu versions that are no longer supported by the Ubuntu project.

Prerequisites

In order to forward traffic from 80/443 to 8080/8443, first you must ensure that iptables has allowed traffic on all 4 of these ports. Use the following command to list the current iptables configuration:

 iptables -L -n

You should see in the output entries for 80, 443, 8080, and 8443. Here is an example output for comparison.

ain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)target     prot opt source               destination
target     prot opt source               destination
ACCEPT     tcp  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           tcp dpt:443
ACCEPT     tcp  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           tcp dpt:80
ACCEPT     tcp  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           tcp dpt:8080
ACCEPT     tcp  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           tcp dpt:8443
ACCEPT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           state RELATED,ESTABLISHED
ACCEPT     icmp --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0
ACCEPT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0
ACCEPT     tcp  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           state NEW tcp dpt:22
REJECT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           reject-with icmp-host-prohibited

Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination
REJECT     all  --  0.0.0.0/0            0.0.0.0/0           reject-with icmp-host-prohibited

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination
target     prot opt source

If you dont see entries for these ports, then you need to run commands (as root or with sudo) to add those ports. For example, if you see none of these and need to add them all, you would need to issue the following commands:

sudo iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 8443 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 8080 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -I INPUT 1 -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

NOTE: I used -I INPUT 1. In a lot of iptables documentation/examples, you will see -A INPUT. The difference is that -A appends to the list of rules, while -I INPUT 1 inserts before the first entry. Usually when adding new accept ports to iptables configuration, you want to put them at the beginning of the ruleset, not the end. Run iptables -L -n again and you should now see entries for these 4 ports.

Forwarding

Once traffic on the required ports are allowed, you can run the command to forward port 80 traffic to 8080, and port 443 traffic to 8443. The commands look like this:

sudo iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080
sudo iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8443

You can verify the forwarding rules using below command.

[root@xyz~]# iptables -L -t nat
Chain PREROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination
REDIRECT   tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             tcp dpt:http redir ports 8080
REDIRECT   tcp  --  anywhere             anywhere             tcp dpt:https redir ports 8443

Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

Chain POSTROUTING (policy ACCEPT)
target     prot opt source               destination

Once these rules are set and confirmed with iptables -L -n, and once your Jenkins controller is up and running on port 8080, attempt to access your Jenkins controller on port 80 instead of 8080. It should work and your URL should stay on port 80 - in other words, it should not get redirected to 8080. The fact that forwarding from 80 to 8080 (or 443 to 8443) should remain hidden from the client.

Saving iptables Configuration

Using the iptables command to change port configuration and routing rules only changes the current, in-memory configuration. It does not persist between restarts of the iptables service. So, you need to make sure you save the configuration to make the changes permanent.

Saving the configuration is slightly different between Red Hat rpm based and Debian-based systems. On Red Hat-based systems (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, CentOS, etc), issue the following command:

sudo iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/iptables

On a Debian-based system (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc), issue the following command:

sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables.rules"

The iptables-restore command will need to be executed manually, or your system configured to automatically run it on boot, against the /etc/iptables.rules file you have created, in order for your iptables configuration to be retained across reboots. On Ubuntu, the fastest way is to install iptables-persistent after configuring iptables. It will automatically create the required files from the current configuration and load them on boot.

sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo for other Ubuntu options. There are many other resources describing this; please consult your system’s documentation or search on the internet for information specific to your flavor of Linux.

If you are unsure at all about what kind of system you have, consult that system’s documentation on how to update iptables configuration.

Using firewalld

Some Linux distributions (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, Oracle Linux, CentOS, etc.) ship with firewalld which serves as a front-end for iptables. Configuration thru firewalld is done via the firewall-cmd command. Instead of using any of the iptables commands mentioned above, all you should need to do is something like:

# allow incoming connections on port 80.
# You can also use --add-service=http instead of adding a port number
sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=80/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent \
                  --add-forward-port=port=80:proto=tcp:toaddr=127.0.0.1:toport=8080

# allow incoming connections on port 443.
# You can also use --add-service=https instead of adding a port number
sudo firewall-cmd --add-port=443/tcp --permanen
t
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent \
                  --add-forward-port=port=443:proto=tcp:toaddr=127.0.0.1:toport=8443
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

With the above commands, jenkins can be configured to run on localhost:8080 and/or localhost:8443 (depending if you need or want to do SSL or not)

firewalld will then create the required iptables rules so that incoming connections on port 80 are forwarded to jenkins on 8080 (and 443 is forwarded to 8443).

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