Gitpod great, except plotting.. Anyone managed to fix plotting?

Tooling
1

I have tried gitpod since I’d like to code on my iPad on travel. Its great, almost exactly like vscode, and extensions seem mostly to work. BUT… Any plotting from Julia seems to run into some barrier. I tried both Plots with gr() and plotly() as well as standalone VegaLite.

I get erros like:

Plots/gr: /home/gitpod/.julia/packages/GR/BwGt2/src/…/deps/gr/bin/gksqt: error while loading shared libraries: libQt5Widgets.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
connect: Connection refused
GKS: can’t connect to GKS socket application

Plots/plotlyjs: Error showing value of type Plots.Plot{Plots.PlotlyJSBackend}:
ERROR: IOError: connect: connection refused (ECONNREFUSED)

or VegaLite:

julia> data |> @vlplot(:point, x=:Miles_per_Gallon, y=:Horsepower)
Error showing value of type VegaLite.VLSpec:
ERROR: IOError: could not spawn xdg-open /tmp/jl_0nTC0a.vegalite.html: no such file or directory (ENOENT)

2

Almost one year later this still appears to be an issue, but I’ve been using UnicodePlots as a workaround. So far I’m pretty happy with developing for Julia in Gitpod, but it would definitely be nice to have full plotting functionality. If you’ve figured it out, please let me know!

3

In the interest of completeness, I just spent the day getting Julia working with my Julia repos. Here’s the .gitpod.Dockerfile that I found worked for me:

FROM gitpod/workspace-full

ENV JULIA_PATH /usr/local/julia
ENV PATH $JULIA_PATH/bin:$PATH

RUN wget https://julialang-s3.julialang.org/bin/linux/x64/1.10/julia-1.10.3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
RUN sudo mkdir $JULIA_PATH
RUN sudo tar -xzf julia-1.10.3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -C $JULIA_PATH --strip-components 1

Plotting works, as do Jupyter notebooks with Julia kernels.