How is Tomcat handled by IntelliJ IDEA 10.5

IntelliJ IDEA instructs Tomcat to use temporary directory as CATALINA_BASE where it places context configuration with the Artifact path from your project settings, it doesn't copy your web application into webapps directory.

In the Tomcat Run/Debug configuration there is Logs tab where you can specify custom logs to show in IDEA console, it should work out of the box, but probably you have customized logging in Tomcat configuration or in the application itself. Or maybe Tomcat 7 logging configuration is different and doesn't work with IDEA in which case you should submit a bug.

Here's some info for Windows users....if you check the boxes for 'Show console when stdout/stderr change', you may find that the Output tab does not show up even if stdout/stderr change.

For me, this was due to directory structure for the project containing spaces.

When I renamed the directory structure so that it did not contain spaces the Output tab showed up.

Found solution here: Cannot deploy project to tomcat inside intellij IDEA 14. Applications Context was incorrect.

Run/Debug Configurations -> Deployment tab -> Applications Context