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.

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