Matplotlib
Release 3.1.1
John Hunter, Darren Dale, Eric Firing, Michael Droettboom and the matplotlib development team
July 02, 2019
CONTENTS
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Part I
User’s Guide
1
CHAPTER
ONE
INSTALLING
Note:
opment version.
If you wish to contribute to the project, it’s recommended you install the latest devel-
Contents
• Installing
– Installing an official release
∗ Test data
– Third-party distributions of Matplotlib
∗ Scientific Python Distributions
∗ Linux: using your package manager
– Installing from source
∗ Dependencies
∗ Building on Linux
∗ Building on macOS
∗ Building on Windows
· Wheel builds using conda packages
· Conda packages
1.1 Installing an official release
Matplotlib and its dependencies are available as wheel packages for macOS, Windows and
Linux distributions:
python -m pip install -U pip
python -m pip install -U matplotlib
Note: The following backends work out of the box: Agg, ps, pdf, svg and TkAgg.
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Matplotlib, Release 3.1.1
For support of other GUI frameworks, LaTeX rendering, saving animations and a larger se-
lection of file formats, you may need to install additional dependencies.
Although not required, we suggest also installing IPython for interactive use. To easily install
a complete Scientific Python stack, see Scientific Python Distributions below.
1.1.1 Test data
The wheels (*.whl) on the PyPI download page do not contain test data or example code.
If you want to try the many demos that come in the Matplotlib source distribution, download
the *.tar.gz file and look in the examples subdirectory.
To run the test suite:
• extract the lib/matplotlib/tests or lib/mpl_toolkits/tests directories from the source
distribution;
• install test dependencies: pytest, Pillow, MiKTeX, GhostScript, ffmpeg, avconv, Im-
ageMagick, and Inkscape;
• run python -mpytest.
1.2 Third-party distributions of Matplotlib
1.2.1 Scientific Python Distributions
Anaconda and Canopy and ActiveState are excellent choices that ”just work” out of the box for
Windows, macOS and common Linux platforms. WinPython is an option for Windows users.
All of these distributions include Matplotlib and lots of other useful (data) science tools.
1.2.2 Linux: using your package manager
If you are on Linux, you might prefer to use your package manager. Matplotlib is packaged
for almost every major Linux distribution.
• Debian / Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python3-matplotlib
• Fedora: sudo dnf install python3-matplotlib
• Red Hat: sudo yum install python3-matplotlib
• Arch: sudo pacman -S python-matplotlib
1.3 Installing from source
If you are interested in contributing to Matplotlib development, running the latest source
code, or just like to build everything yourself, it is not difficult to build Matplotlib from source.
Grab the latest tar.gz release file from the PyPI files page, or if you want to develop Matplotlib
or just need the latest bugfixed version, grab the latest git version, and see Install from source.
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Chapter 1.
Installing