Tomcat 7 Manager can't login

Question

Trying to log in but can\'t. My tomcat-users.xml, modified as I saw it here.

Answer 1

I had some problems with access Tomcat's manager (v8.0) as part of NetBeans (v8.2) IDE under Windows 10.

The actual tomcat-users.xml file to add gui-manager user/password pairs is located at C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\NetBeans\8.2\apache-tomcat-8.0.27.0_base\conf\ path. Open tomcat-users.xml file and add some rows:

  <role rolename="manager-gui"/>
  <role rolename="manager-script"/>
  <role rolename="manager-jmx"/>
  <role rolename="manager-status"/>
  <user username="root" password="root" roles="manager-gui,manager-script,manager-jmx,manager-status"/>

After that you should restart Tomcat and try access manager again.

Answer 2

And also check if it is not commented with:

<!-- ... -->

Answer 3

Remove the spaces between the roles for admin/admin. The list should just be comma separated as so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="manager-gui"/>
  <role rolename="manager-script"/>
  <role rolename="manager-jmx"/>
  <role rolename="manager-status"/>
  <role rolename="admin-gui"/>
  <role rolename="admin-script"/>
  <user username="admin" password="admin" roles="manager-gui,manager-script,manager-jmx,manager-status,admin-gui,admin-script"/>
</tomcat-users>

Answer 4

I had the same issue but for me the reason was the server.xml file.

Within the file there is a tag which specifies the path of the tomcat-users.xml:

  <GlobalNamingResources>
<!-- Editable user database that can also be used by
     UserDatabaseRealm to authenticate users
-->
<Resource name="UserDatabase" auth="Container"
          type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase"
          description="User database that can be updated and saved"
          factory="org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabaseFactory"
          pathname="/etc/tomcat7/tomcat-users.xml" />

You have to make sure the pathname is set correctly to the location of your tomcat-users.xml file.

Answer 5

You also need to restart Tomcat after making changes to tomcat-users.xml or server.xml, context.xml or web.xml for the changes to be effective.

In my case, the problem was I did not restart Tomcat after making changes. Also on Tomcat 7 I had assigned manager-script, manager-gui roles to the same user. So Tomcat gave 403 error to enforce CRSF protection.

Wrong:

<role rolename="manager-script" />
<role rolename="manager-gui" />
<user username="maven-deployer" password="s3cret" roles="manager-script,manager-gui" />

Correct:

<role rolename="manager-script" />
<role rolename="manager-gui" />
<user username="maven-deployer" password="s3cret" roles="manager-script" />
<user username="gui-manager" password="s3cret" roles="manager-gui" />

Answer 6

Check the permissions and ownership on the file '/etc/tomcat7/tomcat-users.xml'. It should owned by root and group ownership should be tomcat7.

-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat7 2101 Jan 22 10:34 tomcat-users.xml

This is on Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS, YMMV