403 Access Denied on Tomcat 8 Manager App without prompting for user/password

Question

I have set up tomcat 8 according to this, and I have the following tomcat-users.xml file:

Answer 1

In my case it was the security constraints defined in web.xml. Make sure they have the same roles you use in your tomcat-users.xml file.

For example, this is one of the out-of-the-box tags and will work with the standard tomcat-users.xml.

 
    
      HTML Manager interface (for humans)
      /html/*
    
    
       manager-gui
    
  

In my case an admin had used a different role-name which prevented me from accessing the manager.