Load tomcat application via DNS without typing 8080 - apache

Question

I am having a Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instance. I have installed LAMP server and tomcat 7. I also have application running in tomcat.
Now, my URL for apache is - http://ec2-54-xx-xx-xx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/
My URL for tomcat application is: http://ec2-54-xx-xx-xx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com:8080
Instead of writing the 8080 part, I would like to call this directly via the URL http://ec2-54-xx-xx-xx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/.
I went through lot of tutorials, all are invalid, out dated or missing details. I am apache2, so the files inside the apache2 directory are below.
How can I do this "properly"? Because I will purchase a domain name in this weekend and I will replace the long amazon URL with this one soon as well.

Answer 1

What you need is a reverse proxy. You should setup nginx or httpd server instance, which would proxy requests from port 80 (http) to your local 8080 port (tomcat).
Here's a sample configuration for nginx:
upstream tomcat {
server 127.0.0.1:8080; # your tomcat app address
}
server {
listen 80;
root /path/to/your/app/directory;
index index.html index.htm;
server_name your.app.domain;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/index.html $uri.html #tomcat;
}
location #tomcat {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_pass http://tomcat;
}
}