Basic Interactive barplot with plotly

This post shows how to plot a basic barplot using the plotly library in python.

The first example uses the plotly.express module and the second example uses the plotly.graph_objects module.

Dataset

For a barplot, we need a dataset with two columns: one for the categories and one for the values.

Let's create it using pandas:

import pandas as pd
data = {
   'category': ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'],
   'value': [17, 42, 33, 55, 25]
}

df = pd.DataFrame(data)
df.head()

	category	value
0	A	17
1	B	42
2	C	33
3	D	55
4	E	25

Barplot with plotly express

The chart is made using using the bar() function from the plotly.express module.

We just have to pass the df object, and specify which column we want to plot. In this case it's the category and the value (defined above).

import plotly.express as px
fig = px.bar(
   df,
   x='category',
   y='value'
)
fig.update_traces(marker_color='green')
fig.show()

Now we save it as an html element in order to render it

# save widget to html
fig.write_html(
    "../../static/interactiveCharts/582-simple-barplot-plotly-1.html"
)

%%html

<iframe
    src="../../interactiveCharts/582-simple-barplot-plotly-1.html"
    width="790"
    height="700"
    title="Barplot with plotly express"
    style="border:none">
</iframe>

Barplot with plotly graph object

import plotly.graph_objects as go

data = go.Bar(
    x=df['category'],
    y=df['value'],
    marker_color='red'
)
fig = go.Figure()
fig.add_trace(data)
fig.show()

Now we save it as an html element in order to render it

# save widget to html
fig.write_html(
    "../../static/interactiveCharts/582-simple-barplot-plotly-2.html"
)

%%html

<iframe
    src="../../interactiveCharts/582-simple-barplot-plotly-2.html"
    width="790"
    height="700"
    title="Barplot with plotly graph object"
    style="border:none">
</iframe>

Going further

Contact & Edit

👋 This document is a work by Yan Holtz. You can contribute on github, send me a feedback on twitter or subscribe to the newsletter to know when new examples are published! 🔥