Book Image

Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash

By : Elias Dabbas
Book Image

Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash

By: Elias Dabbas

Overview of this book

Plotly's Dash framework is a life-saver for Python developers who want to develop complete data apps and interactive dashboards without JavaScript, but you'll need to have the right guide to make sure you’re getting the most of it. With the help of this book, you'll be able to explore the functionalities of Dash for visualizing data in different ways. Interactive Dashboards and Data Apps with Plotly and Dash will first give you an overview of the Dash ecosystem, its main packages, and the third-party packages crucial for structuring and building different parts of your apps. You'll learn how to create a basic Dash app and add different features to it. Next, you’ll integrate controls such as dropdowns, checkboxes, sliders, date pickers, and more in the app and then link them to charts and other outputs. Depending on the data you are visualizing, you'll also add several types of charts, including scatter plots, line plots, bar charts, histograms, and maps, as well as explore the options available for customizing them. By the end of this book, you'll have developed the skills you need to create and deploy an interactive dashboard, handle complexities and code refactoring, and understand the process of improving your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Building a Dash App
6
Section 2: Adding Functionality to Your App with Real Data
11
Section 3: Taking Your App to the Next Level

Running the app on the server

What we will do in this section is exactly what we did back in Chapter 1, Overview of the Dash Ecosystem. We will clone the code and data repository from GitHub and get them to the server, install the dependencies, and try to run the app.

You typically have Python already installed on such servers, but it's always good to check and know how to get it, in case you don't. An easy way to check if we have it installed, and to get the version in one go, is to run python --version from the command line. Keep in mind that the python command can be interpreted to mean Python 2. The upgrade to Python 3 took a while to get fully implemented, and so, during that time, to differentiate between the two versions the python3 command was used, to be explicit about wanting to run Python version 3. This applies to the pip command, which can also be run as pip3.

When I ran python3 --version, I got version 3.8.6. By the time you read this, the default version...