Tomcat manager is essential for administrative tasks. However, by default, it’s not functional. There are few things you must do for tomcat manager to work. Let’s see how… As a best practice – take a backup of configuration file before modification so you can roll-back when something goes wrong.
Tomcat 6.x/7.x
Login to Tomcat server Go to installation directory and then conf folder Open the tomcat-users.xml and add the following above syntax
Note: change the password from tomcat to something complex.
Restart Tomcat and try to log in
It should be successful.
Tomcat 8.x/9.x
By default, Tomcat 8 manager is configured to be accessed from the same server where it’s installed. If you access manager, you will get 403 error.
For a manager to be accessible from any host/IP, you need to do the following.
Go to Tomcat installation and then webapps/manager/META-INF Open context.xml and comment Valve section as below
Ex:
Save the file Next, go to conf folder and open tomcat-users.xml to adding the following above syntax
Save the configuration file and restart the Tomcat
Login should be ok now. I hope this helps. If you are new to Apache Tomcat or interested in learning more about administration, then I would recommend this online course.
