/manager/html in tomcat installation not accessible

Question

I just installed tomcat 6 in Debian 6 with the apt-get:

apt-get install tomcat6 tomcat6-common tomcat6-docs tomcat6-admin tomcat6-user

After that, http://localhost:8080 is accessible without any problems, also the jsp and servlet examples run as expected.

To be able to access the /manager/html area, I edited the file $CATALINA_HOME/skel/conf/tomcat-users.xml, now it looks like this:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<tomcat-users>
   <role rolename="manager" />
   <role rolename="admin" />
   <role rolename="tomcat" />
   <user username="tomcat" password="secret" roles="tomcat,admin,manager" />
</tomcat-users>

After that, I restarted tomcat with:

/etc/init.d/tomcat6

When I try to access http://localhost:8080/manager/html and enter "tomcat" : "secret" into the htaccess-box, I get "Access denied". Why this? Is there anything else I have to do?

Answer 1

The role you need to access WEB admin interface is called manager-gui. It is sufficient to add these two lines to /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml (within tomcat-users tag):

<role rolename="manager-gui"/>
<user username="tomcat" password="secret" roles="manager-gui"/>

and restart the server.