Fixing Streamlit `st.plotly_chart` Deprecation Warning

by Alex Johnson 55 views

Unraveling the st.plotly_chart kwargs Deprecation Mystery

Hey there, fellow data enthusiasts and Streamlit developers! Have you recently encountered a rather puzzling deprecation warning when using st.plotly_chart in your Streamlit applications? Specifically, a warning about **kwargs being deprecated, even when you're just trying to set a simple width or height parameter like width="content"? You're definitely not alone in this head-scratcher. This common issue, often experienced with Streamlit version 1.50.0 and Python 3.14.2 (as reported), has caused some confusion because it flags what seems like a perfectly legitimate, documented parameter as an old, soon-to-be-removed feature. It's like being told you're using an outdated tool when you're actually holding the latest model! We're here to dive deep into this st.plotly_chart kwargs deprecation warning, explain why it's popping up, and offer clear, human-friendly solutions to keep your dashboards running smoothly without those annoying yellow boxes.

Streamlit, the fantastic open-source app framework for machine learning and data science, makes creating beautiful, interactive web applications a breeze. One of its most powerful features is the seamless integration with plotting libraries, especially Plotly, through st.plotly_chart. Plotly, with its robust capabilities for interactive data visualization, allows you to craft intricate and engaging charts that truly bring your data to life. The st.plotly_chart function is designed to take a Plotly figure object and display it within your Streamlit app, offering parameters to control how that chart behaves and looks on your page. Users often want to adjust the size of their charts to fit the application's layout, and for this, Streamlit provides parameters like width and height. For example, setting width="content" is a very common and documented way to make your Plotly chart adapt to its container's width, ensuring a responsive and aesthetically pleasing user experience. So, when a deprecation warning appears for using such a standard parameter, it naturally raises questions and can feel like a setback in an otherwise smooth development process. This article will walk you through the nuances of this warning, helping you understand its origin and providing actionable steps to address it, ensuring your Streamlit applications remain dynamic and warning-free. We’ll look at the specific code that triggers this warning and discuss how the community and developers are approaching this peculiar situation.

Understanding st.plotly_chart and Its Core Parameters

Before we dissect the warning, let's take a moment to appreciate st.plotly_chart and how it empowers your Streamlit apps with stunning interactive visualizations. At its heart, st.plotly_chart is a gateway that allows you to embed complex Plotly graphs directly into your web applications, making data exploration and presentation incredibly intuitive. When you create a go.Figure() using Plotly, it’s a standalone object that st.plotly_chart then renders. This function is designed with a set of well-defined parameters to give you control over the rendering behavior, such as use_container_width, width, height, config, and key. These parameters are explicitly outlined in the official Streamlit documentation, guiding developers on how to best customize their chart displays.

Consider the width parameter, a particularly important one for responsive design. When you set width="content", you're telling Streamlit to let the Plotly chart determine its own width based on its internal layout. This is distinct from use_container_width=True (which itself was deprecated and replaced by use_container_width being a default behavior or implicitly handled by width values like