“UserWarning: Matplotlib is currently using agg, which is a non-GUI backend, so cannot show the figure.” when plotting figure with pyplot on Pycharm

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

I too had this issue in PyCharm. This issue is because you don't have tkinter module in your machine.

To install follow the steps given below (select your appropriate os)

For ubuntu users

 sudo apt-get install python-tk

or

 sudo apt-get install python3-tk

For Centos users

 sudo yum install python-tkinter

or

 sudo yum install python3-tkinter

For Windows, use pip to install tk

After installing tkinter restart your Pycharm and run your code, it will work