How to hide Tomcat version from error messages when using embedded servers in Java

Question

I have a java application where i'm using embedded Tomcat servers, which looks like this

Tomcat tomcat = new Tomcat()

I'm creating an embedded tomcat server here.

Problem statement

whenever there's an error it displays information on which tomcat version i'm using,

how to hide this in java?

i have a little idea that i need to override ServerInfo.properties, but how do i do this?

Answer 1

I'm not sure how we can do this in java, but if you are using any build scripts like ant / gradle for distribution purpose, we can write a task to override / harden the jar file, and replace the ServerInfo.properties file with the customized value whatever we need.

the code for ant build scripts would look like

<target name="override.tomcat">
        <jar destfile="path/to/tomcat-embed-core-9.0.62.jar" update="true">
            <fileset dir="src/"> <!-- folder where you keep the directory/file to raplace-->
                <include name="org/apache/catalina/util/ServerInfo.properties"/> <!-- file to replace within directory path in side the jar-->
            </fileset>
        </jar>
    </target>

and in gradle

task overRideTomcat(type: Jar) {
    from(zipTree(file("path/to/tomcat-embed-core-9.0.62.jar"))) {
        exclude '**/org/apache/catalina/util/ServerInfo.properties'
    }

    from('src/') {
        include('/org/apache/catalina/util/ServerInfo.properties')
    }

    archiveName "tomcat-embed-core-9.0.62.jar"
}

make sure you have the modified ServerInfo.properties file under src directory in the same path as you have mentioned in the include statement.