The plotly Package

Plotly is an open-source, interactive graphing library for Python - Plotly GitHub repo

Reference

• https://github.com/plotly/plotly.py

• https://plot.ly/python/

• https://plot.ly/python/reference/

• https://plot.ly/python/reference/#layout

• https://plot.ly/python/getting-started/

• https://plot.ly/python/user-guide/

• https://plot.ly/python/static-image-export/#write-image-file

• https://plot.ly/python/setting-graph-size/

• https://plot.ly/python/bar-charts/

• https://plot.ly/python/horizontal-bar-charts/

Installation

First install the package using Pip, if necessary:

pip install plotly

Usage

For learning purposes, prefer to construct charts using the "offline" versions which don't require a Plotly account or API key.

To display a new chart, construct it by specifying certain chart configuration options, including the type of chart (e.g. scatterplot), and the data to visualize:

# adapted from: https://plot.ly/python/getting-started/#initialization-for-offline-plotting

import plotly
import plotly.graph_objs as go

plotly.offline.plot({
    "data": [go.Scatter(x=[1, 2, 3, 4], y=[4, 3, 2, 1])],
    "layout": go.Layout(title="hello world")
}, auto_open=True)

the resulting chart - a boring straight line with four points

NOTE: after a few seconds, the chart will automatically open in your web browser.

Consult the documentation and examples for a variety of chart customization options.

More Examples

A pie chart example:

# adapted from: https://plot.ly/python/pie-charts/

import plotly
import plotly.graph_objs as go

labels = ["Oxygen", "Hydrogen", "Carbon_Dioxide", "Nitrogen"]
values = [4500, 2500, 1053, 500]

trace = go.Pie(labels=labels, values=values)

plotly.offline.plot([trace], filename="basic_pie_chart.html", auto_open=True)

the resulting chart - a pie chart with four slices

Further Exploration

See also the plotly.express package, which allows you to construct graphs from pandas DataFrames.