This vignette describes how to use the luzlogr package, which provides flexible but lightweight logging facilities for R scripts.
To install this package, use R’s install.packages()
function or the “Packages” pane in RStudio. To install the latest,
developmental version of this package from GitHub:
devtools package installed from
CRAN and loaded.install_github("bpbond/luzlogr")Three functions - openlog(), printlog(),
closelog() - provide logging of script output. They’re
simple to use:
The resulting log file test.log looks like this (not
including the initial ## characters):
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 Opening test.log
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 message
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 Closing test.log flags = 0
## -------
## R version 4.6.0 (2026-04-24)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
## Running under: Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS
##
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3
## LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.26.so; LAPACK version 3.12.0
##
## locale:
## [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
## [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
## [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
## [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
## [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
##
## time zone: Etc/UTC
## tzcode source: system (glibc)
##
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
##
## other attached packages:
## [1] luzlogr_0.2.1 rmarkdown_2.31
##
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
## [1] assertthat_0.2.1 digest_0.6.39 R6_2.6.1 fastmap_1.2.0
## [5] xfun_0.57 maketools_1.3.2 cachem_1.1.0 knitr_1.51
## [9] htmltools_0.5.9 buildtools_1.0.0 lifecycle_1.0.5 cli_3.6.6
## [13] sass_0.4.10 jquerylib_0.1.4 compiler_4.6.0 sys_3.4.3
## [17] tools_4.6.0 evaluate_1.0.5 bslib_0.11.0 yaml_2.3.12
## [21] jsonlite_2.0.0 rlang_1.2.0By default individual lines are prefixed with a timestamp, end with a carriage return, and the entire log starts with an open message and ends with a close one.
Any printable object can be written to a log. For example:
(Notice in this case we’ve told closelog() not to append
sessionInfo() output, as it does by default.)
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 Opening test.log
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 message 1 2
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026
## speed dist
## 1 4 2
## 2 4 10
## 3 7 4
## 4 7 22
## 5 8 16
## 6 9 10
##
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 Closing test.log flags = 0By design, luzlogr is intended to be simple and easy to
use. Nonetheless, it does provide additional features, including:
In many circumstances, we want messages to have different priorities or levels associated with them. Each logfiles has a minimum priority level, set when it’s opened, making it easy to produce logs with varying levels of detail–for example, under development versus release conditions.
By default, luzlogr logs have a minimum levels of
-Inf: in other words, they’ll accept every single message
sent to them via printlog(), which produces messages with a
default level of zero. We can change the log’s level, however, and this
will then affect which messages appear in the log.
openlog("test.log", loglevel = 0)
printlog("This message will appear", level = 0)
printlog("So will this (level 0 by default)")
printlog("This will not", level = -1)
closelog(sessionInfo = FALSE)produces
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 Opening test.log
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 This message will appear
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 So will this (level 0 by default)
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 Closing test.log flags = 0Notice that the third message didn’t get logged. If we change the
loglevel parameter in openlog() to -1 or
lower, however, all these messages will appear.
Another way to differentiate messages is by flagging them.
Note that in all the above examples, when the log is closed, a
flags = 0 message is printed. But we can change that:
openlog("test.log")
printlog("A normal message")
printlog("A flagged message!", flag = TRUE)
flaglog("Another")
closelog(sessionInfo = FALSE)## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 Opening test.log
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 A normal message
## ** Flagged message: **
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 A flagged message!
## ** Flagged message: **
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 Another
## Mon May 18 08:25:03 2026 Closing test.log flags = 2So far, only messages sent via printlog() appear in the
log. We might, however, want to capture everything1 produced
by a script. To do this, use the sink = TRUE option of
openlog().
If an error occurs in your script, any log files will by default
remain open. If using a single log file, it’s easy to put a statement
such as suppressWarnings(closelog()) at the start of your
script. Alternatively, you can tell luzlogr to close
all open logs if an error occurs:
Logs can also be sent to any R connection: a pipe, compressed file, URL, etc.
con <- gzfile("test.log.gz")
openlog(con)
printlog("Sending to a compressed logfile")
closelog(sessionInfo = FALSE)Note that luzlogr won’t close a connection that was
already open at the time of the openlog() call.
If you’re logging to log A and open log B (without closing A),
subsequent printlog() messages will go to B. When you close
B, logging switches back to A (i.e., there’s a stack of logs that gets
pushed/popped when necessary).
If you need to append to an existing log, use
append = TRUE when calling openlog(). By
default, existing logfiles are erased upon opening.
This concludes the Introduction to luzlogr vignette.
Almost. Messages, warnings, and errors will not appear;
but see ?sink and its type = "message"
parameter.↩︎