How to Access Tomcat Manager in Tomcat8.5 and above

In versions of Apache Tomcat 8.5 and above, the default Tomcat has locked down the access of Tomcat Manager to local IP addresses. This is a particularly thorny problem for cloud installations of xDM where the server is not located on the same machine you are using to access xDM. All our AWS customers will probably hit this issue.

The fix is to edit the context.xml file under:

/usr/share/tomcat8/webapps/manager/META-INF

(the exact file path might be different on your installation).

2 Different Options For Opening Access To Tomcat Manager

Edit the context.xml file in the META-INF folder.

  1. Comment out the valve for unrestricted access, or
  2. Add your IP address.