Non interactive figures on unix

I'm trying to compile an executable for a Unix machine using the deployment tool to build an application, which works fine until when I try to run as a batch process. The problem seems to be the use of figures. The code imports data, plots, and saves a figure - this script is run hourly to update a website. I don't really need to see the figure, just need to get the resulting image. When run as batch, the figure doesn't seem to be opening so no image gets written. Can it be compiled so that it runs without a gui?