Importing Vega & Vega-Lite Versions

The main Altair API is based on version 2.X of Vega-Lite. The core of the API, found in the altair.vegalite.v2.schema module, is programmatically generated from the Vega-Lite schema.

Altair additionally provides wrappers for several other schemas:

• Vega-Lite 1.X in altair.vegalite.v1

• Vega 2.X in altair.vega.v2

• Vega 3.X in altair.vega.v3

So, for example, if you would like to create Altair plots targeting Vega-Lite version 1, you can use:

import altair.vegalite.v1 as alt

and then proceed to use the Altair version 1 API.

Note

We strongly recommend all users transition to Vega-Lite 4.x and Vega 5.x. These versions support many new features, are more stable, and Altair 4 works best with them.

Because Altair has focused primarily on the vega-lite API, the vega wrappers are far less developed than the vega-lite wrappers, though it is possible to create Vega plots using a very low-level Python interface that mirrors the schema itself.