Basic form Access

In Basic authentication, if you try to hit a web application protected URL and you are currently unauthenticated:

• A popup window appears and you enter a particular username/password, which gets sent to Tomcat
• Tomcat checks to see that the sent username and password match a user entry in tomcat-users.xml
• If we have a match (username/password), the user retrieves associated static roles and gains access to the application resource

The below schema shows you the cinematic behind this kind of access:

The following procedure should work:

• With Tomcat 8 and Tomcat 9
• Under Windows and Linux

To ensure this installation procedure, it is admitted that:

• Tomcat instance is installed and available
• The operator has RW privileges in needed files and folders to proceed to the installation

In the following procedure, we will use below variables:

The Basic form authentication uses the UserDatabaseRealm to authenticate the user and retrieve static roles.

To do so, Tomcat configuration should be set as this:

• In <TOMCAT_INSTALL_FOLDER>/conf/server.xml, a resource must be declared and encapsulated in the Global JNDI Resources section

<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>

• The pathname variable must point to a file which contains all portal users credentials

<tomcat-users>
...
    <user username="<LOGIN>" password="<PASSWORD>" roles="<ROLE1, ROLE2, ..., ROLEn>"/>
...
</tomcat-users>

• After declared, the realm UserDatabaseRealm must be declared in the <Engine> section

<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">
...
    <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm"
        resourceName="UserDatabase"/>
...
</Engine>