Creating Interactive Charts with Python Pygal

When it comes to interactive charts and the modules you can use, you may be familiar with Matplotlib, Seaborn, and Bokeh, which each allow interactivity and support additional features.

However, Pygal specializes in allowing the user to create SVGs. Besides the scalability of an SVG, you can edit them in any editor and print them in very high quality resolution. SVG formatting is easily integrated with Flask and Django as well. Lastly, you can easily and minimally create line charts, bar graphs, and Radar Charts (to name a few) with very little code, as we'll see shortly with the following examples:

Open Terminal

Extra Help: Installing and Dependencies - Link

For our first example we'll create a bar chart. We'll simply need to create a variable and store pygal.Bar() inside.

You can easily use pygal.Line, pygal.pie, or any of the following.

Next we need to start creating our chart. I will be using Data that I scraped from a gaming tracker for the game Destiny 2. Eventually the graph will be live and I'll be able to see my stats change (hopefully) in real time.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

In short, everytime I play in a PvP or Crusible Match and eliminate an opponent or end up getting eliminated myself, the KD (Kill/Death Ratio) will change. I simply want to compare myself to my clan mates.

Thus, to start things off, we'll need a chart title.

Now we can start adding in our data. I need 3 bars, one for each player. To accomplish this, I'll need to use add followed by a title and some values.

Technically, we can finish and render without further customization. To render quickly to a browser, we'll use render_in_browser() as our output.

Say we want some custom colors added to our graph #E80080 #404040 #9BC850

This is easy to do, and can actually be achieved in multiple ways. First, import style from pygal.style.

You can change a number of objects by simply adding:

Notice I left the parentheses open.

Properties & Description

plot_backgroundThe color of the chart area background backgroundThe color of the image background foreground|The main foregrond color colorsThe serie color list value_colorsThe print_values color list Complete List: http://www.pygal.org/en/stable/documentation/custom_styles.html

Let's change the color of our bars by using the object colors.Don't forget to indent and close our final parentheses.

Now, all we need to do is pass style=custom_style in our pygal.Bar() to get it to work.

It's that simple. I would check out Pygal's documentation for further builds. However, after reading this guide, you should have all the knowledge needed to create visually appealing graphs and charts with Python Pygal.

Thanks for reading this guide on using the Pygal module. Say hello on Twitter.