Quickly visualize CSV data from the command line

• Install
• Usage
• Examples
• Contributing

Install

Installing as npm package

1. Install node.js via package manager or download, if you haven't already.

2. Install the vcli package globally

$ npm install -g vcli

Usage

USAGE
  $ vcli [FILE]
  $ cat [FILE] | vcli

ARGUMENTS
  FILE  Path to CSV file (instead of piping data into vcli)

OPTIONS
  -h, --help           show CLI help
  -v, --version        show CLI version

  -x, --x-axis=x-axis  Column index/name to plot on x-axis of charts. For date fields you can specify an aggregate function like start_date:month
                       (supports day/month/year)

  -y, --y-axis=y-axis  Column index/name to plot on y-axis of charts. You can also specify an aggregate function like sales:sum (supports
                       count/min/max/sum/mean/median/p5/p95)

  --facet=facet        Column index/name that will be used to group data into separate charts
  --port=port          Port to run the local webserver on (default is 8888)

Examples

Launch "Overview" visualization with stats & distributions for all columns in the file

$ vcli data.csv

Launch "Analysis" visualization with specified configuration

$ vcli -x date:month -y cases:sum --facet state data.csv

Pipe CSV data from an API into vcli

$ curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/master/us-counties.csv | vcli

Troubleshooting

Working with very large files

By default Node.js processes have 512mb of memory, if you are processing a very large file you could run into out of memory errors like the following:

FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory

You can increase this memory limit by prepending your vcli command with an extra option:

export NODE_OPTIONS="--max_old_space_size=8192" && vcli ...

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, see CONTRIBUTING.md