posted 8 years ago
Depending on which Tomcat you download, the Manager app may or may not come pre-installed.
The Tomcat admin and manager webapps are ordinary webapps that just happen to have the purpose of controlling and monitoring Tomcat. As such, they conform to the same architectural constraints as any other webapp. Meaning that they are both WARs.
As I recall, if you download a Tomcat with these apps pre-installed, their WARs have already been exploded as the "manager" and ROOT subdirectories of TOMCAT_HOME/webapps. If you download them separately, you can yourself unzip them to those locations. I don't believe that there's any external Context definition, so it' sufficient to simply drop these directories into TOMCAT_HOME/webapps. You don't even need to restart Tomcat. By default, Tomcat will automatically deploy them once it has detected them in the webapps directory during one of its periodic scans for changes (which happen once a minute more or less).
The only 2 things to allow for is that you WILL need to set up a security realm for these apps (the sample stuff using the TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml file is sufficient, just add userid, password and roles as needed). And of course, you need to make sure you have sufficient RAM to run these new webapps in addition to whatever is already running.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.