As an important component of both urban complex socio-economic-natural ecosystems and urban infrastructure, urban ecological infrastructure plays an important role in maintaining the stability of natural ecological processes. It furthermore promotes social and economic development, and is important for guaranteeing the quality of the living environment. In the process of rapid urbanization, scientific management of urban ecological infrastructure is particularly important. Therefore, this paper reviewed four core components (its definition, the principles, management types, and key theoretical problems and related methods) of urban ecological infrastructure management (UEIM), in order to clarify the existing methods, and their strengths and weaknesses, to benefit future urban ecological infrastructure management. The first part of this study discusses two questions: what is UEIM, and what should UEIM do. UEIM is an active management process. First, it should define the principles of ecological infrastructure protection and construction in favor of sustainable urban development in the urbanization process. Furthermore, the integration of existing UEIM approaches in this process is useful, as the ultimate objective is to propose a system of UEIM approaches. In the second part, we suggest four principles for UEIM, for which explanations and several examples are provided. These principles include the preferential protection principle, the structural optimization principle, the dynamic adaptability principle, and the appropriate intervention principle. In the third part, we review the existing methods for UEIM and separate them into two types: guiding management (related policy and market strategy) and compulsory management (laws and regulations, and compulsory trade standards). In the fourth and most important part, three key issues regarding quantitative management and its related methods are summarized. This includes how to identify urban ecological infrastructure hubs, how to account suitable areas of urban ecological infrastructure, and how to optimize the pattern of urban ecological infrastructure. Hubs in the urban ecological infrastructure network represent the most ecologically important large natural areas that remain urban. These hubs can be identified by species diversity index, maximum continuous area, the value of the ecological system services, or conservation areas already protected by the government. The practical method for estimating a suitable ecological infrastructure area can be divided into three categories: the method based on experiences and standards, the supply-demand balance calculation method (carbon-oxygen balance method, or precipitation and water-holding capacity), and the ecological security pattern based on ecological processes (the water security pattern, biological diversity security pattern, or scope of geological hazards). Furthermore, methods of constructing optimal patterns for ecological infrastructure can be broadly divided into three categories: a property evaluation (relevance, suitability, or sensitivity), an index optimization model (landscape index, or graph theory), and an ecosystem process model (based on the actual landscape pattern process, or based on the simulated cost-distance model). In the final section, suggestions for future studies were put forward, which highlight the importance of UEIM at multiple scales. Since apparent connections between the different scales exist, it is important for urban ecological infrastructure management to integrate multiple scale analyses, and to clearly identify the relationships between these different scales.