Django-Plottings Documentation

Introduction

Django Plottings is a library for using Matplotlib graphing library within the Django Web Framework. It can be used to produce plots in three different ways:

  • As a view that responds to clients request, to serve the plot alone.

  • As a value to be inserted in a web page template, to serve the plot as part of a webpage.

  • As a file saved to storage for background processing.

The idea behind this project is to provide a fast way to go from data analysis to production using Django framework, proposing an opinionated way of building the graphs similar to those of Django class based views.

It includes integration with the Django cache so plots don’t need to be regenerated every time the same graph is requested. It also provides an step for post processing the graphs after rendering but before caching to add a watermark or whatever.

This tool is focused in high-quality rendering graphics, it is not a very performant solution, if you need high speed rendering there are other tools more suitable for this purpose.

Server Side Rendering

This solution build the graphics on the server an alternative to rendering graphs in the browser and this has its advantages:

  • Data never leves the server.

  • More resources available for rendering.

  • No need for front end programing.

  • No need for a full featured web browser for rendering.

And its drawbacks:

  • More computing power to render the requests.

  • More memory required for each server thread.

  • Non interactive graphs.

Compatibility

This module currently supports two file formats PNG and SVG. The compatibility is not fully checked, it runs with the lastest versions of Django 5.0, Numpy 2.0, Matplotlib 3.9 and Python 3.12.4.

It has been tested in Linux and Mac OS environments but should run on Windows as well.

About

This is project is originated as a side project of Jorge Monforte González.

Project pages: