blank iplot in Jupyter Notebooks

I’ve been having a persistent but intermittent issue with iplot in Juypyter notebooks where the plots are blank, but space is taken up in the Jupyter notebook output for them. It seems to happen most often in notebooks with large amounts of data and frequent replotting within the notebook.

it seems like there at least a few other people with the same issue, across multiple versions of both Jupyter Notebooks and Plotly, but I haven’t seen a definitive solution or explanation other than restarting computer/notebook, which does not always work in my case.

For what it’s worth, in my current Jupyter notebook I’m plotting a simple scatter plot and getting a blank layout:

xs = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
ys = [4, 3, 2, 1, 0]
trace = go.Scatter(
    x = xs,
    y = ys,
    mode = 'markers'
)
data = [trace]
py.iplot(data)

And here is the JS console output:

main.min.js:33264 actions jupyter-notebook:find-and-replace does not exist, still binding it in case it will be defined later...
MenuBar.bind_events @ main.min.js:33264
main.min.js:12429 load_extensions Arguments(2)
main.min.js:12406 Loading extension: export_embedded/main
:8888/nbextensions/export_embedded/main.js?v=20190304112619:22 Notebook version 5.1.0 or higher required for this extension
main.min.js:24777 Session: kernel_created (f1932fce-d600-4f9e-a9d9-f8b88e8ba223)
main.min.js:23933 Starting WebSockets: ws://localhost:8888/api/kernels/6fbd3818-f86b-4d80-92dd-34b08ff15ea0
:8888/static/plotly.js?v=20190304112619:1 Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found)
require.js:140 Uncaught Error: Script error for "plotly"
http://requirejs.org/docs/errors.html#scripterror
    at makeError (require.js:165)
    at HTMLScriptElement.onScriptError (require.js:1732)
main.min.js:12406 Loading extension: jupyter-js-widgets/extension
main.min.js:23577 Kernel: kernel_connected (6fbd3818-f86b-4d80-92dd-34b08ff15ea0)
main.min.js:23577 Kernel: kernel_ready (6fbd3818-f86b-4d80-92dd-34b08ff15ea0)
2Belmont%20HVAC%20Vis.ipynb:1 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'Plots' of undefined
    at eval (eval at globalEval (main.min.js:4), <anonymous>:1:61)

[WinstonDodson]

I had the same problem with plotly not displaying in a notebook in Kaggle.

Due to my use of qgrid, I need to run the notebook, then fresh the browser and then run the notebook again in order for qgrid to properly display the df.

I later added an interactive plotly display to the notebook. When I opened the notebook and ran it the plotly display displayed properly but, as usual, the qgrid didn’t. I then refreshed the notebook and the qgrid displayed properly but the plotly display didn’t. I searched and found this page

https://plot.ly/python/renderers/

I then changed the “fig.show()” line in my code to “fig.show(renderer=“notebook”)”

And this fixed my issue.

From reading the many good examples of troubleshooting above (all of which surpass my abilities) and then the plotly page above I would guess that the problem arises when the plotly API tries to automatically detect the best renderer to use. And so, when this is manually set to ‘notebook’ it solves this issue.

I hope that this helps and look forward to any feedback.

[nicolaskruchten]

I’ve locked this issue for now: if anyone encounters rendering issues in the future please check out our troubleshooting guide at https://plotly.com/python/troubleshooting/ and if that doesn’t help, please feel free to open a new issue 😃