I’ve been an Apache Tomcat user since 2001 when it was selected by one of my colleagues for an internal work project in a closed lab. We were looking for a way to provide centralized access for project and lab information, especially test instructions. We also wanted to provide a nascent dashboard showing how certain systems were operating, and to control those systems. Over time we managed to do all of that via Tomcat.

Tomcat provided an opportunity for me to learn how to write web-based applications using the then-new Servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP) specification implementation. I also learned how to wire MySQL into the back end of Tomcat, and used that to hold quite a bit of the data our lab was generating at the time. Another opportunity it provided was hosting on various operating systems. The first implmentation of our Tomcat lab site was on a small Windows 2000 system sitting in a corner and unused by the lab staff. It was quickly moved over to a Sun box running Solaris, where it stayed for about a year. The following year we took that old Windows 2000 box and installed Red Hat Linux 7 (not RHEL!) on it, and moved the lab site over to it and brought it all up. It stayed there for the rest of the time I worked in the lab (I left in 2004). It was still running when I returned to the lab in 2013, although by that time that stand-alone system had been imaged and moved to a VMware virtual machine.

I’m running an instance of Tomcat version 10.0.23. I wanted to brush up my very rusty skills and knowledge, and see what has changed across the years (nearly two decades, in point of fact) since I last worked with Tomcat. Since this is a development-only deployment it’s installed in my local development folder. To make things as easy as possible for me, here is how I have my Tomcat configuration file set up.

<tomcat-users xmlns="http://tomcat.apache.org/xml"  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"  xsi:schemaLocation="http://tomcat.apache.org/xml tomcat-users.xsd"  version="1.0">  <role rolename="admin"/>  <role rolename="admin-gui"/>  <role rolename="admin=script"/>  <role rolename="manager-gui"/>  <role rolename="manager-script"/>  <role rolename="manager-jmx"/>  <role rolename="manager-status"/>  <user username="admin" password="admin" roles="manager-gui, manager-script, manager-jmx, manager-status, admin-gui, admin-script"/></tomcat-users>

I’ve defined all the role names and assigned all the roles to one username, admin. See lines 5-12. Remember this is a development deployment local to my machine, not something in production. This allows me to work with every page provided by the stock Tomcat web pages.