I am trying to plot a simple graph using pyplot, e.g.:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot([1,2,3],[5,7,4])
plt.show()
but the figure does not appear and I get the following message:
UserWarning: Matplotlib is currently using agg, which is a non-GUI backend, so cannot show the figure.
I saw in several places that one had to change the configuration of matplotlib using the following:
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('TkAgg')
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
I did this, but then got an error message because it cannot find a module:
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'tkinter'
Then, I tried to install "tkinter" using pip install tkinter
(inside the virtual environment), but it does not find it:
Collecting tkinter
Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement tkinter (from versions: )
No matching distribution found for tkinter
I should also mention that I am running all this on Pycharm Community Edition IDE using a virtual environment, and that my operating system is Linux/Ubuntu 18.04.
I would like to know how I can solve this problem in order to be able to display the graph.
tk
I found a solution to my problem (thanks to the help of ImportanceOfBeingErnest).
All I had to do was to install tkinter
through the Linux bash terminal using the following command:
sudo apt-get install python3-tk
instead of installing it with pip
or directly in the virtual environment in Pycharm.
matplotlib
supported GUI backendsTkAgg
Qt5Agg
, GTKAgg
, Qt4Agg
, etc
pip install pyqt5
will fix the issue alsoNOTE:
matplotlib
made the pypi software deps not depend on any GUI backend because some people need matplotlib
without any GUI backend.In my case, the error message was implying that I was working in a headless console. So plt.show()
could not work. What worked was calling plt.savefig
:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot([1, 2, 3], [5, 7, 4])
plt.savefig("mygraph.png")
I found the answer on a github repository.
If you use Arch Linux (distributions like Manjaro
or Antegros
) simply type:
sudo pacman -S tk
And all will work perfectly!