What’s NonRootPortBinding? I just want to run my web server on port 443!

In the Unix world, privileged ports are 1-1024. As a non-root user, you’re not allowed to start a service and listen on them.

So, how do web servers work then? They usually use ports 80 and 443.

There are a few ways around this. The most common is that the process is started as root and then downgraded.

If you want to start a process without ever having root access though, the way to do it is with NonRootPortBinding. You can find information about it using Apache here.

Basically, for any process you want to start on a port under 1025, you can run:

setcap cap_net_bind_service=+ep <path to binary> 

Following that, you can confirm that you’ve set the correct permission by running:

getcap <path to binary> 

It should return with: cap_net_bind_service+ep

When you patch or update the binary, you will need to rerun the setcap command.

Hope this helps!