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I have a headless Ubuntu 14.04 Server that I connect to remotely using SSH. I want to use matplotlib and have plots appear at the ssh client. For example, I would connect using:

ssh -X [email protected]

And then from a Python console, I want this to produce a plot in a window:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot(range(10))
plt.show()

I have installed matplotlib in my virtualenv, and I ran sudo apt-get install python-gtk2, but the plot still doesn't appear. I assume I'm missing lots of packages. What is a fairly minimal set of X-related packages I could install to make this work? I do NOT want to install ubuntu-desktop.

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  • also stackoverflow.com/questions/2801882/… Commented Nov 7, 2014 at 22:08
  • That is not the same question. I explicitly WANT to use an X backend, while the accepted answer on the other question works around that requirement. Commented Nov 7, 2014 at 22:10
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    Sorry about that, the other question comes up so often I pattern-matched too aggressively. Can you get other gui programs to launch and do you have an xserver running on the remote machine? Commented Nov 7, 2014 at 22:14
  • Thanks for untagging! After some trial and error with x-related packages, I can get xeyes to run over ssh. The problem seems to be that when I pip install matplotlib, it doesn't recognize that pygtk is installed. Therefore, the only backend that gets installed is agg. The problem might be that pygtk is installed site-wide rather than in my venv, but I have site packages enabled for this venv. Thus, import pygtk works fine. But the pip installer doesn't seem to realize I have it installed. Commented Nov 7, 2014 at 22:18
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    @10flow - It's possible the auto-detection of which backends to build is being rather quirky in your specific case. A workaround is to manually specify which backends you want when building matplotlib. You'll need to download the source (e.g. tarball) and build things manually (or use something pre-built with a gui backend like anaconda/canopy). To specify the backends, cp setup.cfg.template to setup.cfg and edit it accordingly (the file itself has extensive documentation). Also, if it can't build the gtk backend, you'll get more informative errors, instead of just skipping it. Commented Nov 8, 2014 at 17:46

1 Answer 1

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I got it working on Ubuntu 14.04.1 Server, but it was painful! The tricky part is definitely virtualenv. I finally had luck using the Qt4 backend, which I was only able to install via the Ubuntu package and then had to symlink it into my virtualenv. So here's the step-by-step process...

First install the pre-reqs and hack PyQt4 into your virtualenv:

$ sudo apt-get install xauth x11-apps python-qt4 
$ ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PyQt4 /path/to/myvenv/lib/python2.7/PyQt4

Now manually download and install SIP (http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/sip/intro) with your venv activated, as follows:

$ tar xzf sip-4.16.4.tar.gz
$ cd sip-4.16.4
$ python configure.py
$ make
$ sudo make install

Next, download matplotlib source tarball and modify the setup configuration to force it to install Qt4 backend:

$ tar xzf matplotlib-1.4.2.tar.gz
$ cp matplotlib-1.4.2/setup.cfg.template matplotlib-1.4.2/setup.cfg

Now edit setup.cfg near line 68 to read:

qt4agg = True

Matplotlib will now install cleanly in your venv:

$ pip install -e matplotlib-1.4.2/

Now you can SSH using the -X flag and plots will load remotely!

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