Plotly: How to display charts in Spyder?

Question

Since November 2015, plotly is Open-Source and available for python. https://plot.ly/javascript/open-source-announcement/

When trying to do some plots offline, these work in iPython Notebook (version 4.0.4) But if I try to run them in Spyder (version 2.3.8), i just get the following output:

<IPython.core.display.HTML object>
<IPython.core.display.HTML object>

There's something wrong in my code or the iPython Terminal of Spyder still doesn't support this?

Here goes the example code (taken from https://www.reddit.com/r/IPython/comments/3tibc8/tip_on_how_to_run_plotly_examples_in_offline_mode/)

from plotly.offline import download_plotlyjs, init_notebook_mode, iplot
from plotly.graph_objs import *
init_notebook_mode()

trace0 = Scatter(
    x=[1, 2, 3, 4],
    y=[10, 11, 12, 13],
    mode='markers',
    marker=dict(
        size=[40, 60, 80, 100],
    )
)
data = [trace0]
layout = Layout(
    showlegend=False,
    height=600,
    width=600,
)

fig = dict( data=data, layout=layout )

iplot(fig)  

Solution 1

importing plot instead iplot (and changing the last line from iplot(fig) to plot(fig) resolved the problem, at least in python 3:

from plotly.offline import download_plotlyjs, init_notebook_mode,  plot
from plotly.graph_objs import *
init_notebook_mode()

trace0 = Scatter(
    x=[1, 2, 3, 4],
    y=[10, 11, 12, 13],
    mode='markers',
    marker=dict(
        size=[40, 60, 80, 100],
    )
)
data = [trace0]
layout = Layout(
    showlegend=False,
    height=600,
    width=600,
)

fig = dict( data=data, layout=layout )

plot(fig)  

But instead you could do the following, which is slightly easier:

import plotly
import plotly.graph_objs
plotly.offline.plot({
"data": [
    plotly.graph_objs.Scatter(    x=[1, 2, 3, 4],
    y=[10, 11, 12, 13], mode='markers',
    marker=dict(
        size=[40, 60, 80, 100]))],
"layout": plotly.graph_objs.Layout(showlegend=False,
    height=600,
    width=600,
)
})

Solution 2

If you'd like to develop your plotly figures in Spyder, perhaps because of Spyders superb variable explorer, you can easily display a non-interactive image by just running fig.show(). Note that this is for newer versions of plotly where you don't have to worry about iplot and plotly.offline.

And if you'd like display your figure in the browser as a fully interactive version, just run:

import plotly.io as pio
pio.renderers.default='browser'

Now your figure will be displayed in your default browser.

To switch back to producing your figure in Spyder, just run:

import plotly.io as pio
pio.renderers.default='svg'

You can check other options too using pio.renderers?:

Renderers configuration
-----------------------
Default renderer: 'svg'
Available rendere <...> wser', 'firefox', 'chrome', 'chromium', 'iframe',
'iframe_connected', 'sphinx_gallery']

You'll find even more details here under Setting the default renderer

Here's a detailed example

Code:

import plotly.graph_objects as go

import plotly.io as pio
#pio.renderers.default = 'svg'
pio.renderers.default = 'browser'

x = ['Product A', 'Product B', 'Product C']
y = [20, 14, 23]

fig = go.Figure(data=[go.Bar(
            x=x, y=y,
            text=y,
            textposition='auto',
        )])
fig.show()

Plot:

System info:

Python 3.7.6
Spyder 3.3.1
Plotly 3.2.0