What's the difference between localhost.log, catalina.log, manager.log, host-manager.log ?

you can find all detail in conf/logging.properties and conf/server.xml for the access log.

In short

  • catalina is the container log file,
  • localhost_access (only one defined in server.xml) the access log (= all requests like in httpd),
  • localhost the log of the host and finally
  • host-manager and manager the logs of the related web applications.

Here a commented example to try to help you read logging.propertues:

# log on the host "localhost"
org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].xxx

# log on the host "localhost" for the webapp foo
org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/foo].xxx

More generally the pattern is:

org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[${engine}].[${host}].[${context}]

Side note: ${context} is "/" for the root context.

This syntax applies for ServletContext logging

All is explained https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.5-doc/logging.html