Stuck on an issue?

Lightrun Answers was designed to reduce the constant googling that comes with debugging 3rd party libraries. It collects links to all the places you might be looking at while hunting down a tough bug.

And, if you’re still stuck at the end, we’re happy to hop on a call to see how we can help out.

QXcbConnection: Could not connect to display

See original GitHub issue

When I create a completely fresh conda envirnoment:

conda create --name test ipython matplotlib

and then try to import matplotlib.pyplot from within ipython, I get the following:

In [1]: import matplotlib.pyplot

In [2]: QXcbConnection: Could not connect to display
Aborted

There is no problem when I run the same in the vanilla python shell. Happens for both py2.7.13 (ipython 5.3.0) and py3.6.1 (ipython 6.0.0).

I don’t know whether this is an ipython bug or a conda bug, so I raised an issue first with anaconda, but I wanted to note it here too.

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 6 years ago
Reactions:15
Comments:32 (14 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

101reactions

wmaynercommented, Sep 8, 2017

There’s a solution using environment variables available here:

Setting export QT_QPA_PLATFORM='offscreen' in my .bash_profile worked for me.

22reactions

timothydmortoncommented, Sep 1, 2017

@russelljjarvis it’s a minor annoyance, but if the first command you run when you start up ipython is import matplotlib; matplotlib.use('agg') then ipython should work for you.