How to show correct horizontal axis in ggplotly when it is a date

Question

I'm pretty sure this is a bug, and am hoping in the short term for a workaround.

library(tidyverse)
library(plotly)
d <- tibble(
  date = as.Date("2012-01-01") + 0:5000,
  y = rnorm(5001)
)

p <- ggplot(d, aes (x = date, y = y)) + 
  geom_point() 

p

ggplotly(p)

Here is p as rendered by ggplot2:

The data correctly go up to September 2025.

But here it is as rendered by plotly:

All the data are there, and the tooltips correctly label the points at the right of that chart as referring to September 2025, but according to the x axis they are more like 2022 (in fact, it looks a just transposed four or five years out).

Any advice on a) if this is a bug or am I doing something silly and b) is there a workaround?

Edit to add sessionInfo()

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.6.3 (2020-02-29)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 16299)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252    LC_MONETARY=English_Australia.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                       LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
 [1] plotly_4.9.2    forcats_0.5.0   stringr_1.4.0   dplyr_0.8.5     purrr_0.3.3     readr_1.3.1    
 [7] tidyr_1.0.2     tibble_2.1.3    ggplot2_3.3.0   tidyverse_1.3.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] tidyselect_1.0.0  haven_2.2.0       lattice_0.20-40   colorspace_1.4-1  vctrs_0.2.4       generics_0.0.2   
 [7] htmltools_0.4.0   viridisLite_0.3.0 yaml_2.2.1        rlang_0.4.5       pillar_1.4.3      glue_1.3.1       
[13] withr_2.1.2       DBI_1.1.0         dbplyr_1.4.2      modelr_0.1.6      readxl_1.3.1      lifecycle_0.2.0  
[19] munsell_0.5.0     gtable_0.3.0      cellranger_1.1.0  rvest_0.3.5       htmlwidgets_1.5.1 labeling_0.3     
[25] crosstalk_1.1.0.1 Cairo_1.5-11      fansi_0.4.1       broom_0.5.5       Rcpp_1.0.3        scales_1.1.0     
[31] backports_1.1.5   jsonlite_1.6.1    farver_2.0.3      fs_1.3.2          hms_0.5.3         digest_0.6.25    
[37] stringi_1.4.6     grid_3.6.3        cli_2.0.2         tools_3.6.3       magrittr_1.5      lazyeval_0.2.2   
[43] crayon_1.3.4      pkgconfig_2.0.3   data.table_1.12.8 xml2_1.2.5        reprex_0.3.0      lubridate_1.7.4  
[49] assertthat_0.2.1  httr_1.4.1        rstudioapi_0.11   R6_2.4.1          nlme_3.1-145      compiler_3.6.3  

Answer 1

Turns out this is something going wrong between plotly and the latest version of ggplot2. If I revert from ggplot2 3.3.0 to 3.2.1 the problem fixes itself:

devtools::install_version("ggplot2", version = "3.2.1", repos = "http://cran.us.r-project.org")

library(tidyverse)
library(plotly)

d <- tibble(
  date = as.Date("2012-01-01") + 0:5000,
  y = rnorm(5001)
)

p <- ggplot(d, aes (x = date, y = y)) + 
  geom_point() 

ggplotly(p)

So the workaround is to stick to ggplot2 3.2.1 for now and post a bug report for plotly (I don't think we can call it a ggplot2 bug as it only appears in plotly's interpretation of the scale).