Matplotlib doesn't display graph in virtualenv

Question

I have pip installed matplotlib in my virtualenv and I am trying to plot a simple graph. I use Eclipse and PyDev. When I run the script from Eclipse it doesn\'t display any grap

Answer 1

First off, you might want to check out:

http://matplotlib.org/faq/installing_faq.html#matplotlib-compiled-fine-but-nothing-shows-up-when-i-use-it

To see what's going wrong, check out the matplotlib using git instead of either pip or easy_install. We're going to do a more manual install:

git clone git@github.com:matplotlib/matplotlib.git
cd matplotlib
python setup.py

This will print out the configuration of what pip or easy_install would have done. Look through the "OPTIONAL BACKEND DEPENDENCIES" and make sure that some of the ones that produce windows are enabled (Tkinter, Gtk+, Mac OS X native, Qt, Cairo, etc.). If you see that none of these are available, then you need to install some of these libraries for your operating system before you continue installing matplotlib.

After installing say, Tk (on ubuntu: sudo apt-get install tcl-dev tk-dev), then when you re-run

python setup.py

you will see that the Tk backend is enabled. Proceeding with

python setup.py build && python setup.py install

should get you up and running... but at that point you might even just delete the whole git clone directory and go back to installing with pip.