I like to have the Tomcat manager webapp installed on each instance, so I can play with the webapps, and see how many active sessions there are. To do this, make a file called manager.xml file in $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[Engine]/[hostname]/. Following the default Tomcat installation, this would be $CATALINA_BASE/conf/Catalina/localhost.
An example of what mine typically looks like is below:
<Context path="/manager" docBase="/usr/local/tomcat/server/webapps/manager" debug="0" privileged="true"> <ResourceLink name="users" global="UserDatabase" type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase"/> <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve" allow="127.0.0.1,192.168.100.100"/> </Context>
The key bit is the docBase attribute, which needs to point to the webapp in the Tomcat installation directory. I add a RemoteAddrValve to keep evil people from trying to break into the manager.
You’ll also need to add a user account with permission to use the manager. Put a file called tomcat-users.xml into the conf directory of the Tomcat instance, which should have something like the following:
<tomcat-users> <role rolename="manager"/> <user username="admin" password="hard2Guess" roles="manager"/> </tomcat-users>
Finally, your server.xml file needs to have a UserDatabase configured. This is in the example configuration files from the Tomcat installation.