René's URL Explorer Experiment

{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","headline":"Recommendation for using pyplot vs OOP API","articleBody":"\r\nI would like to know if it is recommended to always use the OOP API if\r\nmatplotlib plots need to be created in a library. \r\n\r\nThe reason why I'm asking is the following: We have lots of libraries that\r\ncreate matplotlib plots non-interactively if the code is run as part of a\r\n(multi-threaded) service on a head-less system or interactively if a\r\nconsole-script is started manually. For these libraries we run unit tests on\r\na CI server. Since we don't explicilty specify a backend (via\r\nmatplotlib.use), we either have to mock the pylot API a bit or run a fake\r\nxserver (Xvfb) in the background to fix issues due to missing DISPLAY env\r\nvar. (On our headless systems we neither use a custom matplotlibrc nor do we\r\nset the MATPLOTLIB_BACKEND env var.  pyqt/pyside is installed on these\r\nsystems because the console scripts depend on qt libs)\r\n\r\nThe matplotlib documentation of the mpl API\r\n(https://matplotlib.org/3.1.1/api/index.html) contains the following two\r\nsentences:\r\n\r\n\u003e At its core, Matplotlib is object-oriented. We recommend directly working\r\nwith the objects, if you need more control and customization of your plots.\r\n\r\n\u003e pyplot is mainly intended for interactive plots and simple cases of\r\nprogrammatic plot generation.\r\n\r\n**Do you recommend to use pyplot in our case or rather recommend us to use the OOP API\r\ndirectly**? Independent of the recommendation I think it makes sense to extend the docs a bit and mention\r\nthis use-case, since our use-case is probably very common.\r\n\r\nBTW There are unfortunately very few (currently only 1:\r\nhttps://matplotlib.org/gallery/api/agg_oo_sgskip.html) examples that show\r\nhow the OOP API is supposed to be used. What is missing IMO is an example\r\nthat shows how to use plotting functions both interactively and\r\nnon-interactively.","author":{"url":"https://github.com/twmr","@type":"Person","name":"twmr"},"datePublished":"2019-10-01T14:06:14.000Z","interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":"https://schema.org/CommentAction","userInteractionCount":6},"url":"https://github.com/15355/matplotlib/issues/15355"}