Edit the width of bars using dataframe.plot() function in matplotlib

For anyone coming across this question:

Since pandas 0.14, plotting with bars has a 'width' command: https://github.com/pydata/pandas/pull/6644

The example above can now be solved simply by using

df.plot(kind='bar', stacked=True, width=1)

See pandas.DataFrame.plot.bar or pandas.DataFrame.plot with kind='bar'.

When changing the width of the bars, it might also be appropriate to change the figure size by specifying the figsize= parameter.

If think you have to "postprocess" the barplot with matplotlib as pandas internally sets the width of the bars.

The rectangles which form the bars are in container objects. So you have to iterate through these containers and set the width of the rectangles individually:

In [208]: df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.random((6, 5)) * 10,               
                        index=list('abcdef'), columns=list('ABCDE'))

In [209]: df
Out[209]: 
     A    B    C    D    E
a  4.2  6.7  1.0  7.1  1.4
b  1.3  9.5  5.1  7.3  5.6
c  8.9  5.0  5.0  6.7  3.8
d  5.5  0.5  2.4  8.4  6.4
e  0.3  1.4  4.8  1.7  9.3
f  3.3  0.2  6.9  8.0  6.1

In [210]: ax = df.plot(kind='bar', stacked=True, align='center')

In [211]: for container in ax.containers:
              plt.setp(container, width=1)
   .....:         

In [212]: x0, x1 = ax.get_xlim()

In [213]: ax.set_xlim(x0 -0.5, x1 + 0.25)
Out[213]: (-0.5, 6.5)

In [214]: plt.tight_layout()