How to Draw a plotly Line Plot in Python (Examples)

This article explains how to draw line plots (also called line charts; curve charts) using the plotly library in the Python programming language.

The tutorial is structured as follows:

Modules and Example Data

If you have not already done so, install and load these modules:

from vega_datasets import data
import pandas as pd
import plotly.express as px

We’ll use the stocks dataset for this example, which is included in the vega datasets module. We’ll store the data in df_long and df_wide to provide examples using two different structures of the same data.

df_long = pd.DataFrame(data.stocks())
df_long
 
# index	symbol	date	price
# 0	MSFT	2000-01-01 00:00:00	39.81
# 1	MSFT	2000-02-01 00:00:00	36.35
# 2	MSFT	2000-03-01 00:00:00	43.22
# 3	MSFT	2000-04-01 00:00:00	28.37
 
 
df_wide = df_long.pivot(index = 'date', columns = 'symbol', values = 'price').reset_index()
df_wide
 
# symbol	date	AAPL	AMZN	GOOG	IBM	MSFT
# 0	2000-01-01	25.94	64.56	NaN	100.52	39.81
# 1	2000-02-01	28.66	68.87	NaN	92.11	36.35
# 2	2000-03-01	33.95	67.00	NaN	106.11	43.22
# 3	2000-04-01	31.01	55.19	NaN	99.95	28.37

These DataFrames contain identical information. However, they are structured differently to show examples that work in a large variety of settings.

Basic Line Plots

Let’s create a simple line plot to show Amazon’s stock price over time, which is a single column in df_wide:

fig1 = px.line(
    data_frame = df_wide
    ,x = 'date'
    ,y = 'AMZN'
)
 
fig1.show()

To add the other variables from the wide data set, we just need to provide a list of the columns to plot on the y axis:

fig2 = px.line(
    data_frame = df_wide
    ,x = 'date'
    ,y = ['AMZN', 'MSFT']
)
 
fig2.show()

This method is quick and easy, but wide data structures are not always as convenient when you have many variables to plot, or when they may change throughout the course of a script. Let’s show how easy it is to plot all the companies in our long dataset, and how we can add a marker to each measurement:

fig3 = px.line(
    data_frame = df_long
    ,x = 'date'
    ,y = 'price'
    ,color = 'symbol'
    ,markers = True
)
 
fig3.show()

Customizing Line Plots

These examples demonstrate how to alter the colors, dashes, and curves of your line plots.

Custom Colors

This example shows how you can specify the exact colors to use for each line. You can use the generic CSS color text, hex codes, or rgb codes. When you have already mapped the color of each line to one of your variables, you can pass a dictionary to the color_discrete_map argument specifying each group and the desired color.

fig4 = px.line(
    data_frame = df_long
    ,x = 'date'
    ,y = 'price'
    ,color = 'symbol'
    ,color_discrete_map={"MSFT":"gray", "AMZN":"gray", "IBM":"gray", "GOOG":"#faad07", "AAPL":"rgb(187,23,209)"}
)
 
fig4.show()

Tip: Using gray for most colors except those you wish to highlight can be an effective technique to draw your viewers attention to the most important elements of a graph.

Custom Dashes

Similar to our color mapping, we can also specify the line style for each group:

fig5 = px.line(
    data_frame = df_long
    ,x = 'date'
    ,y = 'price'
    ,color = 'symbol'
    ,line_dash = 'symbol'
    ,line_dash_map={"MSFT":"solid", "AMZN":"dot", "IBM":"dash", "GOOG":"longdash", "AAPL":"dashdot"}
)
 
fig5.show()

Line Shape

Finally, you can change specify whether lines are shaped as linear or spline. This is most noticeable on graphs with fewer points, so this example shows a limited range of data to highlight the differences:

fig6 = px.line(
    data_frame = df_wide[df_wide['date']> '2009-10-01'],
    x = 'date'
    ,y = 'AMZN'
    ,markers = True
    ,line_shape='linear'
)
 
fig6.show()
fig6.update_traces(patch = {"line_shape":"spline"})
fig6.show()

Further Resources

 
You can check out these other articles for more detailed examples and videos of these popular charts in plotly using the Python programming language:

• Draw Three-Dimensional Line Plot Using plotly in Python
• plotly Barplot in Python
• plotly Boxplot in Python
• plotly Histogram in Python
• plotly Scatterplot in Python
• Introduction to plotly in Python
• Introduction to the Python Programming Language