jupyterlab interactive plot

Question

I'm getting into using Jupyterlab from Jupyter notebooks. In notebooks I used to use:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib notebook
plt.figure()
x = [1,2,3]
y = [4,5,6]
plt.plot(x,y)

for interactive plots. Which now gives me (in jupyterlab):

JavaScript output is disabled in JupyterLab

I have also tried the magic (with jupyter-matplotlib installed):

%matplotlib ipympl

But that just returns:

FigureCanvasNbAgg()

Inline plots:

%matplotlib inline

work just fine, but I want interactive plots.

Answer 1

As per Georgy's suggestion, this was caused by Node.js not being installed.

Answer 2

To enable the jupyter-matplotlib backend, use the matplotlib Jupyter magic:

%matplotlib widget
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure()
x = [1,2,3]
y = [4,5,6]
plt.plot(x,y)

More info here jupyter-matplotlib on GitHub