To generate a report from a log file, you use the lr_log2report command. This command expects a log file on standard input and will output the report on standard output. It takes the Lire service of the log file as its argument. The various supported services can be found by running lr_check_service -l, see the lr_log2report(1) man page for details. The lr_log2report command will log a lot of information on standard error. You can use the lr_run wrapper to filter those messages according to your preferences.
Example 3.2. Generating a Report With lr_log2report
This is the way to generate a report in the default output format for a log file taken from an Apache™ log server.
$ lr_run lr_log2report combined < \ /var/log/apache/access_log > ~/report.txt
Another output format than the default one (usually text) can be selected by using the -o switch with the lr_log2report command.
Example 3.3. Generating A HTML Report
To generate a HTML report from the same log file as above, you would use the following command:
$ lr_run lr_log2report -o html_page combined < \ /var/log/apache/access_log > ~/apache.tar
This will create a tar archive containing the report. Unpack it using the tar command, or unpack it on the fly, doing:
$ lr_run lr_log2report -o html_page combined < \ /var/log/apache/access_log | tar xf -
This will create a report directory in the current working directory, holding the HTML report file.
Lire can generate charts (pie chart, bar chart, line graph or histogram) for some reports. If you have the necessary programs installed, you can tell lr_log2report to make the charts by adding the -i option to your command line (Only the PDF, HTML, XHTML and DocBook XML output formats support charts).
Example 3.4. Generating A HTML Report With Charts
To include charts with the HTML report, you would use the following command:
$ lr_run lr_log2report -o html -i combined < \ /var/log/apache/access_log | tar xfC - /tmp
In this case, we piped the output to tar because what is outputted is a tar file. This tar file contains a directory called report which contains the charts in PNG format and the HTML report in the index.html file. The command creates a directory /tmp/report/.