react-plotly.js

A plotly.js React component from Plotly. The basis of Plotly's React component suite.

👉 DEMO

👉 Demo source code

Contents

• Installation
• Quick start
• Usage
  • build with plotly.js
    • build with webpack
    • build with create-react-app
  • With external plotly.js (for example by <script> tag)
  • As a standalone bundle
• API
  • props
  • Event handler props
• Roadmap
• Development

Installation

$ npm install react-plotly.js plotly.js

Quick start

The easiest way to use this component is to import and pass data to a plot component. To import the component,

import Plot from 'react-plotly.js'

Then to render a plot,

render () {
  return (
    <Plot
      data={[
        {
          type: 'scatter',
          mode: 'lines+points',
          x: [1, 2, 3],
          y: [2, 6, 3],
          marker: {color: 'red'}
        },
        {
          type: 'bar',
          x: [1, 2, 3],
          y: [2, 5, 3]
        }
      ]}

      layout={{
        width: 320,
        height: 240,
        title: 'A Fancy Plot'
      }}
    />
  );
}

You should see a plot like this:

For a full description of Plotly chart types and attributes see the following resources:

• Plotly JavaScript API documentation
• Full plotly.js attribute listing

Usage

Using this component inside a larger application may require some additional considerations in addition to the simple usage example above. The following sections detail two basic use-cases.

Build with plotly.js

plotly.js is a peer dependency of react-plotly.js. If you would like to bundle plotly.js with the rest of your project and use it in this component, you must install it separately.

$ npm install -S react-plotly.js plotly.js

Since plotly.js is a peer dependency, you do not need to require it separately to use it.

Build with Webpack

If you build your project using webpack, you'll have to follow these instructions in order to successfully bundle plotly.js.

import Plot from 'react-plotly.js'

render () {
  return <Plot
    data={...}
    layout={...}
    frames={...}
    config={...}
  />
}

If you are building with Webpack but do not have access to the Webpack configuration or if you don't want to configure webpack see build with create-react-app.

Build with create-react-app

In this case, we want to use react-plotly.js without building plotly.js and use a version of plotly.js that is already built (see building an external plotly.js). This demo app was built with create-react-app and there 3 basic steps:

1. Import plotly.js in a <script> tag in public/index.html
2. Declare Plotly as a global in App.js
3. Use createPlotlyComponent() in App.js

This lets us skip the specific build configuration necessary to build plotly.js in webpack environments (create-react-app uses webpack under the hood).

With external plotly.js

If you wish to use a version of plotly.js that is not bundled with the rest of your project, whether a CDN version or through a static distribution bundle, you may skip installing plotly.js and ignore the peer dependency warning.

$ npm install -S react-plotly.js

Given perhaps a script tag that has loaded a CDN version of plotly.js,

<script src="https://cdn.plot.ly/plotly-latest.min.js"></script>

you may then inject Plotly and use the returned React component:

/* global Plotly:true */

import createPlotlyComponent from 'react-plotly.js/factory'

/* (Note that Plotly is already defined from loading plotly.js through a <script> tag) */
const Plot = createPlotlyComponent(Plotly);

render () {
  return <Plot
    data={...}
    layout={...}
    frames={...}
    config={...}
  />
}

Note: You must ensure Plotly is available before your React app tries to render the component. That could mean perhaps using script tag (without async or defer) or a utility like load-script.

As a standalone bundle

For quick one-off demos on CodePen or JSFiddle, you may wish to just load the component directly as a script tag. We don't host the bundle directly, so you should never rely on this to work forever or in production, but you can use a third-party service to load the factory version of the component from, for example, https://unpkg.com/react-plotly.js@latest/dist/create-plotly-component.js.

You can load the component with:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/react-plotly.js@1.0.1/dist/create-plotly-component.js"></script>

And instantiate the component with

const Plot = createPlotlyComponent(Plotly);

ReactDOM.render(
  React.createElement(Plot, {
    data: [{x: [1, 2, 3], y: [2, 1, 3]}]
  }),
  document.getElementById('root')
);

You can see an example of this method in action here.

API

Props

To make a plot responsive, i.e. to fill its containing element and resize when the window is resized, use style or className to set the dimensions of the element (i.e. using width: 100%; height: 100% or some similar values) and set useResizeHandler to true while setting layout.autosize to true and leaving layout.height and layout.width undefined. This will implement the behaviour documented here: https://plot.ly/javascript/responsive-fluid-layout/

Event handler props

Event handlers for plotly.js events may be attached through the following props.

Roadmap

This component currently creates a new plot every time the input changes. That makes it stable and good enough for production use, but plotly.js will soon gain react-style support for computing and drawing changes incrementally. What does that mean for you? That means you can expect to keep using this component with little modification but that the plotting will simply happen much faster when you upgrade to the first version of plotly.js to support this feature. If this component requires any significant changes, a new major version will be released at the same time to ensure stability. See plotly/react-plotly.js#2 for more information about this feature.

Development

To get started:

$ npm install
$ npm start

To transpile from ES2015 + JSX into the ES5 npm-distributed version:

$ npm run prepublishOnly

To run the tests:

$ npm run test

License

© 2017 Plotly, Inc. MIT License.