save plotly plot to local file and insert into html

I am using python and plotly to product interactive html report. This post gives a nice framework.

If I produce the plot(via plotly) online, and insert the url into the html file, it works but refreshing the charts takes a long time. I wonder if I could produce the chart offline and have it embedded in the html report, so that loading speed is not a problem.

I find plot offline would generate a html for the chart, but I don't know how to embed it in another html. Anyone could help?

Solution

Option 1: Use plotly's offline functionality in your Jupyter Notebook (I suppose you are using a Jupyter Notebook from the link you are providing). You can simply save the whole notebook as a HTML file. When I do this, the only external reference is to JQuery; plotly.js will be inlined in the HTML source.

Option 2: The best way is probably to code directly against plotly's JavaScript library. Documentation for this can be found here: https://plot.ly/javascript/

Update: Calling an internal function has never been a good idea. I recommend to use the approach given by @Fermin Silva. In newer versions, there now is also a dedicated function for this: plotly.io.to_html (see https://plotly.com/python-api-reference/generated/plotly.io.to_html.html)

Hacky Option 3 (original version for reference only): If you really want to continue using Python, you can use some hack to extract the HTML it generates. You need some recent version of plotly (I tested it with plotly.__version__ == '1.9.6'). Now, you can use an internal function to get the generated HTML:

from plotly.offline.offline import _plot_html
data_or_figure = [{"x": [1, 2, 3], "y": [3, 1, 6]}]
plot_html, plotdivid, width, height = _plot_html(
    data_or_figure, False, "", True, '100%', 525)
print(plot_html)

You can simply paste the output somewhere in the body of your HTML document. Just make sure that you include a reference to plotly in the head:

<script src="https://cdn.plot.ly/plotly-latest.min.js"></script>

Alternatively, you can also reference the exact plotly version you used to generate the HTML or inline the JavaScript source (which removes any external dependencies; be aware of the legal aspects however).

You end up with some HTML code like this:

<html>
<head>
  <script src="https://cdn.plot.ly/plotly-latest.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
  <!-- Output from the Python script above: -->
  <div id="7979e646-13e6-4f44-8d32-d8effc3816df" style="height: 525; width: 100%;" class="plotly-graph-div"></div><script type="text/javascript">window.PLOTLYENV=window.PLOTLYENV || {};window.PLOTLYENV.BASE_URL="https://plot.ly";Plotly.newPlot("7979e646-13e6-4f44-8d32-d8effc3816df", [{"x": [1, 2, 3], "y": [3, 1, 6]}], {}, {"showLink": false, "linkText": ""})</script>
</body>
</html>

Note: The underscore at the beginning of the function's name suggests that _plot_html is not meant to be called from external code. So it is likely that this code will break with future versions of plotly.