Plotting from a server

General Usage
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1

I just opened an issue asking how to use GR without graphical server (https://github.com/jheinen/GR.jl/issues/442) and would like to give a bit of context here. I have a Debian server on which I want to produce automatically some png/svg/plotly-html plots every day using Julia and serve the files with Nginx. However, I encounter a segfault error that seems to be due to the lack of graphical server. Did anybody met the same problem? How to fix it?

2

Hum. This definitely should be documented. :smiley:

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3

I closed the issue because the ENV["GKSwstype"] = "100" solved it, but now, I have a different problem:

When doing in the REPL

using GR

ENV["GKSwstype"] = "100"

function toto()
    p = histogram(randn(100))
    savefig("fig.png")
end

toto()

I get the png output as expected but when I put the previous code in a module Toto inside a Toto.jl file and call using Toto; Toto.toto() from the REPL, I get the segfault again. So now the question becomes: how to make GR aware of environment variables set in a module?

Answer

The answer I found uses the system environment variables e.g. export GKSwstype=100 before starting Julia. I would have preferred not to use them and go for a pure Julia fix, but here we are…

4

For what it is worth, the CairoMakie backend for Makie is generally much easier to configure on systems without a GUI. Or UnicodePlots of course

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5

Please just swap the first two lines:

ENV["GKSwstype"] = "100"
using GR

BTW: It’s documented here.

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