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chartist-js/chartist

★ 13,394TypeScriptAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A lightweight JavaScript charting library that draws bar, line, and pie charts as SVG, so they scale to any size and can be styled with regular CSS.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((chartist))
    What it does
      SVG charts
      CSS styling
      Responsive scaling
    Chart types
      Bar
      Line
      Pie
    Tech
      TypeScript
      SVG
      npm
    Use cases
      Web pages
      Dashboards
      Accessible charts
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Code map

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filefunction / class

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Add responsive bar, line, or pie charts to a web page without a heavy framework

USE CASE 2

Style chart colors, fonts, and layout entirely through CSS without touching JavaScript

USE CASE 3

Display data visualizations accessible to screen readers via the SVG document structure

USE CASE 4

Embed lightweight charts in a static site or small web app with a single npm install

Tech stack

TypeScriptSVGnpm

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

In plain English

Chartist is a JavaScript charting library for drawing responsive charts on web pages. It renders charts as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) rather than on a canvas element, which means the charts can be styled with regular CSS, scale cleanly to any size, and remain accessible to screen readers and other tools that understand the web's standard document structure. The library was created in response to what its authors saw as common problems with other charting tools: some use canvas (which does not support CSS styling as well as SVG), some ship large file sizes, some are hard to customize, and some are unfriendly to designers. Chartist aims to stay small, simple, and transparent about what it does and does not handle. The scope is intentionally narrow. Chartist handles drawing the chart itself, SVG layout, and the JavaScript API for passing data and configuration. It does not include its own event system, custom label rendering, or interactive behaviors, those are left to standard HTML and JavaScript. The idea is to avoid duplicating things the browser already does well. Getting started is a single npm install command. You then import the specific chart type you want, point it at an HTML element, pass in your data labels and series values, and optionally configure axes or styling. The README shows a bar chart example that takes about ten lines. A plugin system exists but the v1 plugin documentation is listed as coming soon. The full docs and live examples are at chartist.dev.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to create a responsive bar chart with Chartist using these labels and series: labels ['Jan','Feb','Mar'], series [[100,200,150]]
Prompt 2
How do I style a Chartist line chart to use a custom color palette and dashed lines using only CSS?
Prompt 3
Write the minimal HTML and JavaScript to embed a Chartist pie chart on a static webpage
Prompt 4
How do I configure Chartist axes to show custom tick labels and a Y-axis unit suffix like 'ms'?
Prompt 5
Walk me through using the Chartist plugin system to add tooltips to a bar chart once the v1 plugin docs are available
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