Question

I cannot login to the manager application for Tomcat 7.1.1. Even with the right credentials I always get a 403 Access Denied. What am I missing?

tomcat-users.xml:

<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <role rolename="manager-gui"/>
  <role rolename="admin"/>
  <user username="admin1" password="password" roles="manager, admin"/>
  <user username="admin2" password="password" roles="manager-gui"/>
</tomcat-users>

Answer 1

In case tomcat-users.xml file has been changed after tomcat had started, you may be trying to use not the actual user/password pairs. Re-starting tomcat should help in this case.

In case tomcat is started with CATALINA_HOME and CATALINA_BASE pointing to different directories, make sure you’re looking into $CATALINA_BASE/conf/tomcat-users.xml file.

Also, make sure that access to the manager application is controlled by the UserDatabaseRealm, Otherwise, user/password info in this file is not effective. Search for the <Realm/> element in CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml.

There’s also a probability that some other component may override/modify the UserDatabse JNDI resource, which normally reads user and role info from tomcat-users.xml for use by the UserDatabaseRealm. Search for <Resource name="UserDatabase"/> element in CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml.

You may also want to have a look at this page in Tomcat documentation.