401 Unauthorized error while logging in Manager-App of Tomcat

Question

I am trying to log in to the Manager App in Tomcat 7.0.22 for Mac OS X 10.7. Here is the error I am getting: http://f.cl.ly/items/421q1K3f1i0X1H1M181v/so.tiff

Answer 1

Its unlikely that anybody made the same mistake I did, but incase you have a couple versions of tomcat (or have fudged the installation and have files you need to cleanup) make sure you are in the correct folder.

I was looking at the config file in C:\tomcat7\ but the actual Tomcat that was running was in C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\

Answer 2

Shutdown tomcat

paste below comments complete content into tomcat-users.xml and save

start tomcat

Now Build it should work, i did for windows OS with Jenkins and git deployment via tomcat7

<?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 roles="manager-gui, manager-script, manager-jmx, manager-status, admin-gui, admin-script" password="admin" username="admin"/> </tomcat-users>

Answer 3

Just to add some information on @David's answer:

If you are like me and SFTP to the host with any user under a group other than tomcat (for e.g. root) and edit tomcat_users.xml with some generic editor like gedit or VS Code, the group of the file will be changed to the user you used (probably because a new file was created). Like below:

drwxr-x--- 2 root tomcat   4096 Jun 21 11:41 ./
drwxr-xr-x 9 root tomcat   4096 May 24 14:12 ../
-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat  13531 Apr 28 03:34 catalina.policy
-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat   7202 Apr 28 03:34 catalina.properties
-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat   1400 Apr 28 03:34 context.xml
-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat   1149 Apr 28 03:34 jaspic-providers.xml
-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat   2313 Apr 28 03:34 jaspic-providers.xsd
-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat   3850 Apr 28 03:34 logging.properties
-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat   7511 Apr 28 03:34 server.xml
-rw-r----- 1 root root     2342 Jun 21 11:41 tomcat-users.xml
-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat   2633 Apr 28 03:34 tomcat-users.xsd
-rw-r----- 1 root tomcat 170202 Apr 28 03:34 web.xml

Maybe my initial setup of tomcat was a bit casual... But with the above behavior, tomcat will loose access to the edited file. The result would be 401 Unauthorized.

There are a number of options to get around the problem. I'm not sure if any of them is the best practice though.

• Changing permission after the edit (yes sure...).
• nano and WinSCP do not seem to suffer from the issue.
• SETGID: chmod g+s /conf_folder (not tested).
• Follow this answer
• Maybe an editor that is permission-aware?

Answer 4

I was using a particular complex password with lots of odd characters. Just return that back to regular password and worked fine.

Answer 5

Changing the port from 8080 to 8088 in server.xml worked for me.Refer the code below

<Connector port="8088" protocol="HTTP/1.1" 
connectionTimeout="20000"
redirectPort="8443" />

Answer 6

Sorry, I have to ask the obvious: Did you restart Tomcat?

If that doesn't work, try adding "admin-gui" to your roles:

<user name="tomcat" password="s3cret" roles="admin-gui,standard,manager-gui"/>