Tomcat - creating an admin account

Creating a admin account allows you to manage Tomcat from your browser.

The management options are usually available from the Welcome screen when you point your browser to:
http://localhost:8080/

Different versions of Tomcat can have different ways to create admin and user accounts
(they keep enhancing this)

For Tomcat 7.0, open the tomcat-users.xml file that you will find in your Tomcat deployment in the /conf directory.

Add to it an admin user with the 'manager-gui' role, as shown below:
(I have removed all the comments from the file, for clarity)

 <?xml version='1.0' encoding='cp1252'?>  
 <tomcat-users>  
      <user username="admin" password="s3cret" roles="manager-gui"/>  
 </tomcat-users>  
   

manager-gui is one of the Tomcat roles, which allows you to manage Tomcat from the browser. There are also other roles which you can read up in the Tomcat documentation.

You can create as many users as you want, and assign them any combination of roles.