Dynamically serving a matplotlib image to the web using python

Question

This question has been asked in a similar way here but the answer was way over my head (I\'m super new to python and web development) so I\'m hoping there\'s a simpler way o

Answer 1

The above answers are a little outdated -- here's what works for me on Python3+ to get the raw bytes of the figure data.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from io import BytesIO
fig = plt.figure()
plt.plot(range(10))
figdata = BytesIO()
fig.savefig(figdata, format='png')

As mentioned in other answers you now need to set a 'Content-Type' header to 'image/png' and write out the bytes.

Depending on what you are using as your webserver the code may vary. I use Tornado as my webserver and the code to do that is:

self.set_header('Content-Type', 'image/png')
self.write(figdata.getvalue())