[TYPO3-ttnews] Does AWStats have to read the log typo3 generates?

[Bing Du]

Hi,

typo3 4.0.6
AWStats 0.10.0

AWStats works fine for the multiple sites we're hosting.  The only issue
we are facing now is the log files created by typo3 don't have hits on
other types of files (e.g. pdf, doc, jpg etc) besides html.  I've searched
for the awstats related threads on the typo3-english mailing list and
found the trick
http://www.typo3wizard.com/en/snippets/general-config/count-file-downloads-with-awstats.html.
But I was not clear how to make it work for more than one domain because
the log file name is required to be predefined in the script.  Anyway, now
that AWStats is a log reader, I want to turn to use the access log Apache
generates instead.  From what I've gathered from the mailing list, seems
that should be possible.  The Apache access log can be written by root
only. It's worldwide readable.  I'm not going to change that.

localconf.php:

$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['FE']['logfile_dir'] = '/var/log/httpd/';

typoscript setup:

config.stat = 1
config.stat_apache = 1
config.stat_excludeBEuserHits = 1
config.stat_apache_logfile=typo3-dev.engineering.iastate.edu-access.log

I got:

ERROR:
Could not create directory '' to store data for AWStats. Please check
write permissions.

I know typo3 is trying to write to the apache access log but cannot.  My
question is how to just let AWStats read the Apache access log without
typo3 generating its own log?  I tried AWStats stand alone and had no
problem reading Apache's access log at all.  Can anybody shed some lights?

Thanks in advance,

Bing