Manager App HOW-TO

Table of Contents

Introduction

In many production environments, it is very useful to have the capability to deploy a new web application, or undeploy an existing one, without having to shut down and restart the entire container. In addition, you can request an existing application to reload itself, even if you have not declared it to be reloadable in the Tomcat server configuration file.

To support these capabilities, Tomcat includes a web application (installed by default on context path /manager) that supports the following functions:

  • Deploy a new web application from the uploaded contents of a WAR file.
  • Deploy a new web application, on a specified context path, from the server file system.
  • List the currently deployed web applications, as well as the sessions that are currently active for those web apps.
  • Reload an existing web application, to reflect changes in the contents of /WEB-INF/classes or /WEB-INF/lib.
  • List the OS and JVM property values.
  • List the available global JNDI resources, for use in deployment tools that are preparing <ResourceLink> elements nested in a <Context> deployment description.
  • Start a stopped application (thus making it available again).
  • Stop an existing application (so that it becomes unavailable), but do not undeploy it.
  • Undeploy a deployed web application and delete its document base directory (unless it was deployed from file system).

A default Tomcat installation includes the Manager. To add an instance of the Manager web application Context to a new host install the manager.xml context configuration file in the $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[enginename]/[hostname] folder. Here is an example:

<Context privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false"
         docBase="${catalina.home}/webapps/manager">
  <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve"
         allow="127\.0\.0\.1" />
</Context>

If you have Tomcat configured to support multiple virtual hosts (websites) you would need to configure a Manager for each.

There are three ways to use the Manager web application.

  • As an application with a user interface you use in your browser. Here is an example URL where you can replace localhost with your website host name: http://localhost:8080/manager/html .
  • A minimal version using HTTP requests only which is suitable for use by scripts setup by system administrators. Commands are given as part of the request URI, and responses are in the form of simple text that can be easily parsed and processed. See Supported Manager Commands for more information.
  • A convenient set of task definitions for the Ant (version 1.4 or later) build tool. See Executing Manager Commands With Ant for more information.

Configuring Manager Application Access

The description below uses the variable name $CATALINA_BASE to refer the base directory against which most relative paths are resolved. If you have not configured Tomcat for multiple instances by setting a CATALINA_BASE directory, then $CATALINA_BASE will be set to the value of $CATALINA_HOME, the directory into which you have installed Tomcat.

It would be quite unsafe to ship Tomcat with default settings that allowed anyone on the Internet to execute the Manager application on your server. Therefore, the Manager application is shipped with the requirement that anyone who attempts to use it must authenticate themselves, using a username and password that have one of manager-xxx roles associated with them (the role name depends on what functionality is required). Further, there is no username in the default users file ($CATALINA_BASE/conf/tomcat-users.xml) that is assigned to those roles. Therefore, access to the Manager application is completely disabled by default.

You can find the role names in the web.xml file of the Manager web application. The available roles are:

  • manager-gui — Access to the HTML interface.
  • manager-status — Access to the "Server Status" page only.
  • manager-script — Access to the tools-friendly plain text interface that is described in this document, and to the "Server Status" page.
  • manager-jmx — Access to JMX proxy interface and to the "Server Status" page.

The HTML interface is protected against CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks, but the text and JMX interfaces cannot be protected. It means that users who are allowed access to the text and JMX interfaces have to be cautious when accessing the Manager application with a web browser. To maintain the CSRF protection:

  • If you use web browser to access the Manager application using a user that has either manager-script or manager-jmx roles (for example for testing the plain text or JMX interfaces), you MUST close all windows of the browser afterwards to terminate the session. If you do not close the browser and visit other sites, you may become