If you want to keep using the workspace metadata for you Eclipse Tomcat instance, here's how you can get the manager webapp to work.
The base configuration instructions can be found in Apache Tomcat 7 Manager App HOW-TO.
In your Servers IDE project, the <server name>-config\server.xml
file should have the following nested entries:
...
<Service name="Catalina">
...
<Engine defaultHost="localhost" name="Catalina">
...
<Host appBase="webapps" autoDeploy="true" name="localhost" unpackWARs="true">
...
Open your Eclipse workspace metadata, where the Tomcat instance folders are published, i.e.:
<your-workspace-dir>\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp<n>
there, inside the conf\
folder create a new folder named Catalina
(derived from <Engine ... name="Catalina">
above), inside this folder create another one named localhost
(derived from <Host ... name="localhost" ...>
above) and in this last one edit a file named manager.xml
with the content as per the linked docs:
<Context privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false"
docBase="${catalina.home}/webapps/manager">
<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve"
allow="127\.0\.0\.1" />
</Context>
Now publish and start the server instance, the manager will be deployed along side the other webapps you have added — for me it is the last one being deployed.
Tested with Tomcat 7, but I guess it would work for any Tomcat version that supports that linked configuration.
Side note
Do not create the above mentioned folders and files inside the configuration stored in the Eclipse Servers project, they won't be published in the org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp<n>\conf
directory.