Where is the "server log" for embedded Tomcat in IntelliJ Ultimate?

Question

IntelliJ Ultimate provides an embedded Tomcat option whose related files (config, logs, etc.) I have trouble finding. In this post, the question is specifically about the Tomcat logs. In my case, it is for a spring boot project using maven, with IntelliJ Utimate 2021.3 on MacOS. Most of the time, it is ok and viewable inside IntelliJ itself, but let's say we wish to copy the file, to view more than the buffer size within IntelliJ, etc., it may be useful to know where the file may be found.

The accepted answer in this SO post points to the Intellij debug/run configurations, as well as to idea.system.path/tomcat/<configuration name>/logs/ (the question in that SO post was slightly different - that was for the case of an external tomcat server on the same machine, rather than an embedded tomcat server).

However, for the case of an embedded tomcat server with IntelliJ Ultimate, it appears that the debug/run config "Logs" tab is empty (it allows additional log sources to be added by pressing the Plus button and specifying the locations of log sources), and idea.system.path doesn't have any tomcat folder. Furthermore, idea.log.path has logs, but these appear to be IntelliJ logs, not tomcat logs.

This other SO post suggests to just search for catalina.out, so I did a find for name *catalina* in my entire home folder and child folders. I also search /var/log. In both case, the tomcat logs were not found.

Any other suggestions? Or if somebody knows exactly where to look?

Answer 1

Tomcat is provided by Spring Boot, not IDE. Please check related article: baeldung.com/spring-boot-embedded-tomcat-logs