An R package for creating interactive web graphics via the open source JavaScript graphing library plotly.js.

Installation

Install from CRAN:

install.packages("plotly")

Or install the latest development version (on GitHub) via devtools:

devtools::install_github("ropensci/plotly")

Getting started

Web-based ggplot2 graphics

If you use ggplot2,

ggplotly()

library(plotly)
g 


By default, 
ggplotly()
 tries to replicate the static ggplot2 version
exactly (before any interaction occurs), but sometimes you need greater
control over the interactive behavior. The 
ggplotly()
 function itself
has some convenient “high-level” arguments, such as 
dynamicTicks
,
which tells plotly.js to dynamically recompute axes, when appropriate.
The 
style()
 function also comes in handy for modifying the
underlying trace
attributes (e.g. hoveron) used to generate the plot:
gg 


Moreover, since 
ggplotly()
 returns a plotly object, you can apply
essentially any function from the R package on that object. Some useful
ones include 
layout()
 (for customizing the
layout),
add_traces()
 (and its higher-level 
add_*()
 siblings, for example
add_polygons()
, for adding new
traces/data),
subplot()
 (for combining multiple plotly
objects),
and 
plotly_json()
 (for inspecting the underlying JSON sent to
plotly.js).

The 
ggplotly()
 function will also respect some “unofficial”
ggplot2 aesthetics, namely 
text
 (for customizing the
tooltip),
frame
 (for creating
animations),
and 
ids
 (for ensuring sensible smooth transitions).

Using plotly without ggplot2

The 
plot_ly()
 function provides a more direct interface to plotly.js
so you can leverage more specialized chart types (e.g., parallel
coordinates or
maps) or even some visualization that the
ggplot2 API won’t ever support (e.g., surface,
mesh,
trisurf, etc).
plot_ly(z = ~volcano, type = "surface")



Learn more

To learn more about special features that the plotly R package provides (e.g., client-side linking, shiny integration, editing and generating static images, custom events in JavaScript, and more), see https://plotly-r.com. You may already be familiar with existing plotly documentation (e.g., https://plotly.com/r/), which is essentially a language-agnostic how-to guide for learning plotly.js, whereas https://plotly-r.com is meant to be more wholistic tutorial written by and for the R user. The package itself ships with a number of demos (list them by running 
demo(package = "plotly")
) and shiny/rmarkdown examples (list them by running 
plotly_example("shiny")
 or 
plotly_example("rmd")
). Carson also keeps numerous slide decks with useful examples and concepts.

Contributing

Please read through our contributing
guidelines.
Included are directions for opening issues, asking questions,
contributing changes to plotly, and our code of
conduct.