JavaScript
A tool for generating charts on the command line.

victory-cli

A tool for generating Victory component image charts on the command line.

Installation

First, install the package globally from npm:

npm install -g victory-cli

Next, install librsvg, which is a dependency for this library to work. THIS IS IMPORTANT:

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install librsvg2-dev

RedHat / OpenSUSE:

sudo yum install librsvg2-devel

Mac OS X:

brew install librsvg

If, after installing LibRSVG through homebrew you are experiencing issues installing this module, try manually exporting the package config with this command:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig

Then try reinstalling this module. For further information, see this thread.

Windows:

You will need cairo and librsvg-2 libraries which is bundled in GTK. Go to http://www.gtk.org/download/win64.php (or http://www.gtk.org/download/win32.php for 32-bit node) and download the all-in-one bundle (these instructions used the following zip http://win32builder.gnome.org/gtk+-bundle_3.6.4-20131201_win64.zip). Unzip the contents in C:\GTK (if you want to change this you must define -GTK_Root=c:\another\path shell variable to npm or node-gyp to reflect your changes), and add "C:\GTK\bin;" to the PATH environment variable in Windows, it's necessary for node-rsvg runtime to load those libs.

Usage

Once installed, you can now run victory-cli from the command line. Check out the usage info below to see some of the cool things you can do:

Usage: victory-cli [data] [script] [options]

  Options:

    -h, --help                   output usage information
    -V, --version                output the version number
    -c, --charttype [charttype]  'area', 'bar', 'line', 'scatter' or 'pie' (default: line)
    -f, --format [format]        'png' or 'svg' (default: png)
    -p, --print                  Prints chart to console (iTerm3 & .png format only!) (default: false)
    -h, --h [h]                  Chart height (default: 500)
    -w, --w [w]                  Chart width (default: 500)
    -x, --x [x]                  Data x value (default: null)
    -y, --y [y]                  Data y value (default: null)
    -t, --theme [theme]          'light', 'dark' or 'hacker' (default: hacker)

Basic Example

So, like Victory, victory-cli comes with some sensible defaults. To render a default line chart to a png, you would run:

victory-cli -c line > test.png

If you instead wanted an svg file, you could run:

victory-cli -c line -f svg > test.svg

You can also use the -c flag to select any of our preset charts, detailed in the usage doc above.

Images in the Term

Generating images is cool, but displaying charts in the terminal is even cooler! By default victory-cli writes to stdout, so you can do things like piping and file output, but you can override this with the -p or --print flag.

Note: This only works on iTerm 3. It should work in HyperChart soon.

victory-cli -c line --print

Boom:

Theming

Out of the box we support a light, dark and hacker (green) theme for your charts. Simply set the -t flag to have the theme applied:

victory-cli -c area -t light --print

Custom Data

So you brought your own data did ya? Thats cool, its the first argument of this bin. You can pass your own data in like this:

victory-cli data/data.json --print

We expect the data to be in a regular chart data format like:

{
    "data": [
        { "x": 0, "y": 15 }
    ]
}

Lets say it isn't though. Thats cool, if its close enough you can use the x and y flags to select your field names. So if your data looks like this:

{
    "data": [
        { "foo": 0, "bar": 15 }
    ]
}

It can still work by running:

victory-cli data/data.json -x foo -y bar --print

If your data is too different from what we accept, check out how to do a custom component script below.

Custom Component Scripts

Ok. You want to get serious here about your customization. We have you covered. The second argument for this bin is a custom script where you can define the component that gets rendered. All you have to do is create a file that returns a function that we can pass data and options to, and that returns a React component that renders a valid SVG. Check this example out:

// script.js

const React = require("react");
const Victory = require("victory");

const {
  VictoryChart,
  VictoryLine,
  VictoryTheme,
  VictoryScatter
} = Victory;

module.exports = function wrapperComponent(data, options) {
  class VictoryWrapper extends React.Component {
    render() {
      return (
        <VictoryChart
          height={options.height}
          width={options.width}
          theme={VictoryTheme.material}
        >
          <VictoryLine
            data={data}
            style={{
              data: {
                stroke: "#3498db"
              }
            }}
          />
          <VictoryScatter
            data={data}
            style={{
              data: {
                fill: "#e74c3c",
              }
            }}
          />
        </VictoryChart>
      );
    }
  }

  return VictoryWrapper;
};

After you've created this file, simply run it like this:

victory-cli data.json script.js --print

And its custom chart city:

Caveats

Victory requires npm v3 and Node > 0.10 for development and git installs

Credits

This project was HEAVILY inspired by Matthew Conlens work on https://github.com/mathisonian/hyperchart

IMPORTANT

This project is in a pre-release state. We're hard at work fixing bugs and improving the API. Be prepared for breaking changes!