Changing cookie JSESSIONID name

Question

I have a requirement of having to run multiple tomcat server in single physical box. While accessing these from a browser, when user switches between the applications, it results in logging out the user previously access application. This is because of JSESSIONID cookie conflict.

One possible solution is to run each applications in different context. Unfortunately, my applications will not work in context path setting as none of the resources are accessed with request.getContextPath() prepended in front.

This leaves me to change the name of cookie JSESSIONID to resolve the conflict. Is there a way to do this? If yes, how?

Hope I'm clear in stating my question.

Note: All my application are running in different port in the same machine.

Answer 1

Everything is much simpler with Servlet API 3.0.

Now you can configure it in your web.xml:

<session-config>
    <cookie-config>
        <name>MY_JSESSIONID_YAHOOOOOO</name>
    </cookie-config>
</session-config>

That's it!

Answer 2

The following works for me on Tomcat7 in the context.xml file:

<Context path="/yourApp" sessionCookieName="custom_session_id">

Answer 3

By Using two following system properties this can be achieved with ease.

• org.apache.catalina.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME
• org.apache.catalina.SESSION_PARAMETER_NAME

Any value can be passed to above properties to change the default values.

Here complete details with some sample script is found.

Answer 4

Tomcat 7 moves this from org.apache.catalina.SESSION_COOKIE_NAME to an attribute on the main <Context> config. http://tomcat.apache.org/migration-7.html#Session_manager_configuration

Answer 5

I don't think it's possible at this point - see https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=42419

The last entry states "This has been fixed in 5.5.x and will be included in 5.5.28 onwards" - which is the next point release - 5.5.27 is the current release.

Answer 6

Not 100% sure if this will work, but you can use the jvmRoute attribute, which is generally used in a load-balanced/clustered environment for the load balancers to be able to tell the nodes apart. Example:

<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="node1">

This will end up generating a JSESSIONID value that looks like "ABCDEF123456.node1".

Documentation link.