How can I re-enable Tomcat Manager in JIRA Standalone?

[Christopher Hatton]

I am playing the part of admin for a small company. At present, we have only one office server, a Mac, and we wish to run several WebApps on it, one of which is Jira.

Due to resource constraints, we only wish to run one WebApp container; so I started out by building and installing the Jira WAR distribution on Tomcat. This was beset with issues; and I appreciate that WAR distribution is not officially supported for OSX.

Consequently, it seemed an easier route would be to install Jira Standalone, then install the other required WebApps within Jira's bundled Tomcat instance.

I have placed a copy of the Tomcat /manager/ application inside /webapps/, but cannot access it as the authentication is never accepted; despite having set up users and roles correctly in tomcat-users.xml.

This tells me that there has been some effective 'lock out' configuration performed with the Jira Tomcat instance. My question is; what configuration changes will be necessary, to enable me to install and run other Webapps within Jira Standalone's bundled Tomcat instance?

I appreciate this question is outside the scope of the Jira application; but it's surely a common issue. I want Jira to 'play nice' and allow me to use this server for other purposes as well.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Actually, your first approach is probably easier. The Tomcat that is bundled with Jira Standalone is configured and tweaked to suit a small to medium Jira installation with no other applications in the container. Unpicking that is not as easy as it sounds.

The WAR distribution loaded into your own Tomcat container probably is the better solution for you. It certainly has been for me in most places, and the cycle of "download, expand, run build.sh, amend Jira.xml and deploy in a Tomcat" has been quite smooth. The problems I've had with that process have always been down to code changes or odd Tomcat settings. Maybe you could expand on the "beset with issues" comment? Even if you definitely go with Standalone, the issues you've had with the WAR could occur in a Standalone too and may be happening because you've got other web applications in there.

[Radu Dumitriu]

So your auth is not allowing you in? I'm not so sure you configured it correctly, JIRA is just an application which obbeys the container rules.

your tomcat users should have:

<user username="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="manager-gui"/>

and your server.xml should have something like:

<GlobalNamingResources>
<Resource name="UserDatabase" auth="Container"
type="org.apache.catalina.UserDatabase"
description="User database that can be updated and saved"
factory="org.apache.catalina.users.MemoryUserDatabaseFactory"
pathname="conf/tomcat-users.xml" />
</GlobalNamingResources>

(otherwise you cannot auth on it)

[Christopher Hatton]

Thanks Radu; this is clearly part of the reconfiguration required. I have already tried this and triple-checked with many similar examples online, but it still does not enable login. There must be some other configuration override being applied by JIRA that I'm missing.

In the end I have given up and resolved to running two Application containers.

[Benjamin Plocek]

A second line is missing in server.xml: Under <Engine name="Catalina"> add the following: <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase"/>

[SenzaDistanza]

Hi all, some people have a simple solution? @Christopher Hatton which solution you used? Thanks!

[l]

Hi All,

I'm also facing same issue here. Do you have a solution for this issue?

[Bastian Wassermann]

Hello Christopher, i have the sam issue with my JIRA instance. Did you find a solution for the tomcat manager or the authentication problem?