Getting Started with Plotly for R

plotly is an R package for creating interactive web-based graphs via the open source JavaScript graphing library plotly.js.

As of version 2.0 (November 17, 2015), graphs created with the plotly R package are rendered locally through the htmlwidgets framework.

Installation

Download from CRAN

Use the install.package() function to install the plotly R package from CRAN. This version may not be the absolute latest version, so we recommend downloading from Github using the instructions below if you can.

install.packages("plotly")
 
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Download from GitHub

Alternatively, you can install the latest development version of plotly from GitHub via the devtools R package:

devtools::install_github("ropensci/plotly")
 
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Note For RStudio Users

RStudio users should ensure that they are using the latest RStudio release in order to ensure compatibility with the htmlwidgets R package.

Rendering Charts

By default, the plotly R package runs locally in your web browser or in the RStudio viewer.

library(plotly)
fig <- plot_ly(midwest, x = ~percollege, color = ~state, type = "box")
fig
 
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Simply printing the plot object will render the chart locally in your web browser or in the RStudio viewer.

Graphs created with the plotly R package are interactive!

Click on legend entries to hide/show traces, click-and-drag on the chart to zoom, double-click to autoscale, shift-and-drag to pan.

Next Steps

Once you have installed the plotly R package, learn more about the fundamentals of making charts and start making basic charts.

What About Dash?

Dash for R is an open-source framework for building analytical applications, with no Javascript required, and it is tightly integrated with the Plotly graphing library.

Learn about how to install Dash for R at https://dashr.plot.ly/installation.

Everywhere in this page that you see fig, you can display the same figure in a Dash for R application by passing it to the figure argument of the Graph component from the built-in dashCoreComponents package like this:

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly() 
# fig <- fig %>% add_trace( ... )
# fig <- fig %>% layout( ... ) 

library(dash)
library(dashCoreComponents)
library(dashHtmlComponents)

app <- Dash$new()
app$layout(
    htmlDiv(
        list(
            dccGraph(figure=fig) 
        )
     )
)

app$run_server(debug=TRUE, dev_tools_hot_reload=FALSE)
 
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