Error loading MySQLdb Module 'Did you install mysqlclient or MySQL-python?'

Question

I am using windows 10 command line for a django project using python34 however, I am facing difficulties with SQL.

I have already installed mysqlclient using pip install mysqlclient==1.3.5 and located the file to make sure I was not delusional. I then ran python manage.py migrate to migrate the tables to the SQL database (I am using phpmyadmin). However when the command returned with...

 File "C:\Users\user\env\lib\site-packages\django\db\backends\mysql\base.py", line 30, in <module>
    'Did you install mysqlclient or MySQL-python?' % e
django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Error loading MySQLdb module: No module named 'MySQLdb'.
Did you install mysqlclient or MySQL-python?

I am aware that questions like these already exist, but not one solution seems to have made any impact on attempts.

Wheelbase

#21440730 ... check this question also – Morrissette

Answer 1

pip install pymysql

Then, edit the __init__.py file in your project origin dir(the same as settings.py)

add:

import pymysql

pymysql.install_as_MySQLdb()

Helbon

Hey thanks, this worked for me, I added your code at the top of init.py I wonder why it needed this :( – Onus

In django backend，it use the module named “MySQLdb” as mysql backend. In the function "install_as_MySQLdb()", you can see " sys.modules["MySQLdb"] = sys.modules["_mysql"] = sys.modules["pymysql"] " where pymysql make itself indicate to "MySQLdb" so that django works – Helbon

Wish I could give this more than one upvote. This is the only solution that worked for me. thanks! – Psilomelane

Thank you, working well with new and old django and MariaDB :) – Gadolinite

I faced this problem when in recent ArchLinux update, new mariaDB and python 3.7 was upgraded with the latest patch. This solution solves the issue. – Barbera

@Helbon Is there any problem if you deploy including this file? or is it OK? – Defoliate

@Ale Just add several lines, that's fine – Helbon

ERROR: django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: mysqlclient 1.3.13 or newer is required; you have 0.9.3. – Blindly

@Blindly Were you able to get around this? – Bloodandthunder

@PratikK. Update to newer version of mysqlclient? – Helbon

I got the same error as @ox when trying to use the PyMySQL workround (the latest current version of PyMySQL is 0.9.3). I have mysqlclient 1.4.2.post1 installed but django doesn't seem to see it, and PyMySQL 0.9.3 but when I configure django to use that instead of mysqlclient I get the version error. – Damon

@jonah I think my issue may have been that I was trying to run a 2.7 codebase in a 3.7 env – Blindly

I used mysqlclient instead of pymysql as pymysql is causing errors. – Creep

mysqlclient also worked for me. And there is no need to put any code in init.py, you just need to install the package and change the database connection properties in the settings.py file – Arthritis

@Blindly If you you use macos + homebrew and still see the error –– check your openssl symlinks #59007102 – Grocer

@Blindly To fix that issue you'll need to add this line too pymysql.version_info = (2, 0, 1, 'final', 0) (use whichever version of mysqlclient you want to "fake"). – Aboveground

get AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode' after adding pymysql.version_info = (2, 0, 1, 'final', 0) – Linseed

My error output asked me to install mysqlclient and such package was not found. I tried pymysql and another error raised. Then I installed cryptography via pip and everything ran ok. – Hedelman

Now I get ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pymysql' – Demilitarize

This worked for me. Thanks for saving me hours and hours of research. – Humfried

Answer 2

Faced same problem after migrating to python 3. Apparently, MySQL-python is incompatible, so as per official django docs, installed mysqlclient using pip install mysqlclient on Mac. Note that there are some OS specific issues mentioned in docs.

Quoting from docs:

Prerequisites

You may need to install the Python and MySQL development headers and libraries like so:

sudo apt-get install python-dev default-libmysqlclient-dev # Debian / Ubuntu

sudo yum install python-devel mysql-devel # Red Hat / CentOS

brew install mysql-connector-c # macOS (Homebrew) (Currently, it has bug. See below)

On Windows, there are binary wheels you can install without MySQLConnector/C or MSVC.

Note on Python 3 : if you are using python3 then you need to install python3-dev using the following command :

sudo apt-get install python3-dev # debian / Ubuntu

sudo yum install python3-devel # Red Hat / CentOS

Note about bug of MySQL Connector/C on macOS

See also: https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=86971

Versions of MySQL Connector/C may have incorrect default configuration options that cause compilation errors when mysqlclient-python is installed. (As of November 2017, this is known to be true for homebrew's mysql-connector-c and official package)

Modification of mysql_config resolves these issues as follows.

Change

# on macOS, on or about line 112:
# Create options
libs="-L$pkglibdir"
libs="$libs -l "

to

# Create options
libs="-L$pkglibdir"
libs="$libs -lmysqlclient -lssl -lcrypto"

An improper ssl configuration may also create issues; see, e.g, brew info openssl for details on macOS.

Install from PyPI

pip install mysqlclient

NOTE: Wheels for Windows may be not released with source package. You should pin version in your requirements.txt to avoid trying to install newest source package.

Install from source

1. Download source by git clone or zipfile.
2. Customize site.cfg
3. python setup.py install

Faultfinder

this worked. For me who use Ubuntu, simply sudo apt-get install python-dev default-libmysqlclient-dev then sudo apt-get install python3-dev then pip install --force-reinstall --ignore-installed --no-binary :all: mysqlclient and it works. – Shawntashawwal

@Shawntashawwal you are a savior man...thanks a lot for this comment. Works fine inside my docker container – Trefoil

Answer 3

For pip

pip install pymysql

For pip3 you should use

python3 -m pip install PyMySQL

Then, edit the init.py file in your project origin directory (the same as settings.py). Add:

import pymysql

pymysql.install_as_MySQLdb()

Story

This worked for amazon linux 2 but I installed few other packages also. – Babar

In my case doesn' t work with python and but work with python3 thank you! – Androsterone

Answer 4

This command did the trick from @Aniket Sinha's answer above:

pip install mysqlclient

Adhere

I needed to run sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev python-dev before this to get it to work. – Icefall

Answer 5

Use the below command to solve your issue,

pip install mysql-python
apt-get install python3-mysqldb libmysqlclient-dev python-dev

Works on Debian

Appassionato

Useless comment. MySQL-python lib doesn't support Python 3.x, mysqlclient should be proper replacement both for py3 and py2, but, unfortunately, sometimes you get Did you install mysqlclient? from Django when mysqlclient is already installed. That is the actual question. – Girlish

@Girlish It's not useless, +1 for solving my problem. – Wassail

Answer 6

If you already have mysqlclient installed (i.e. you see Requirement already satisfied) and are getting Error loading MySQLdb Module, the following worked for me:

1. pip uninstall mysqlclient
2. export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib" and export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include" as explained here
3. pip install mysqlclient

That reinstalls mysqlclient and for whatever reason solved my problem.

Ehlers

Only solution that worked for me out of like 20 – Ellieellinger

Answer 7

For MAC os user:

I have faced this issue many times. The key here is to set these environment variables before installing mysqlclient by pip command. For my case, they are like below:

export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/[email protected]/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/[email protected]/include"

Panoply

worked but with a correction: export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/protobuf/lib" AND export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/protobuf/include" – Funny

Answer 8

I am using python 3 in windows. I also faced this issue. I just uninstalled 'mysqlclient' and then installed it again. It worked somehow

Particle

Same for Mac OS Sonoma. pip uninstall mysqlclient pip install mysqlclient Fixed it. – Plimsoll

Answer 9

edit the init.py file in your project origin directory

import pymysql

pymysql.install_as_MySQLdb()

Brandt

Answer 10

Installing mysqlclient using anaconda is pretty simple and straight forward.

conda install -c bioconda mysqlclient

and then, install pymysql using pip.

pip install pymysql

Hatten

Answer 11

Inspired by @elad silver's answer (thanks).

For OSx (Monterey) this worked for me:

1. Install protobuf

brew install protobuf

2. edit your .bashrc, or .zshenv file with these lines:

export LDFLAGS="${LDFLAGS} -L/usr/local/opt/protobuf/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="${CPPFLAGS} -I/usr/local/opt/protobuf/include"

3. Reinstall mysqlclient

pip uninstall mysqlclient
pip install mysqlclient

Bant

Answer 12

I had this issue just recently even with using the python 3 compatible mysqlclient library and managed to solve my issue albeit in a bit of an unorthodox manner. If you are using MySQL 8, give this a try and see if it helps! :)

I simply made a copy of the libmysqlclient.21.dylib file located in my up-to-date installation of MySQL 8.0.13 which is was in /usr/local/mysql/lib and moved that copy under the same name to /usr/lib.

You will need to temporarily disable security integrity protection on your mac however to do this since you won't have or be able to change permissions to anything in /usr/lib without disabling it. You can do this by booting up into the recovery system, click Utilities on the menu at the top, and open up the terminal and enter csrutil disable into the terminal. Just remember to turn security integrity protection back on when you're done doing this! The only difference from the above process will be that you run csrutil enable instead.

You can find out more about how to disable and enable macOS's security integrity protection here.

Blandishments

Answer 13

I simply needed to update my project's dependencies and then restart the server.

Ics

Answer 14

To solve the problem run: pip install mysql-connector-python==8.0.23

Faced this issue with mysql.connector version 8.0.24 on mac(if code base is same then the issue should happen in windows as well). This file on line 51 imports "from django.db.backends.mysql.base import DatabaseWrapper as MySQLDatabaseWrapper". The imported file has following code 14-20(exact code and error that you received is part of code

try:
    import MySQLdb as Database
except ImportError as err:
    raise ImproperlyConfigured(
        'Error loading MySQLdb module.\n'
        'Did you install mysqlclient?'
    ) from err

The error is formed here. Not sure why this import keeps coming back in different version of mysql connector but 8.0.23 does not have the import, so I reverted to that version and error was gone... This is incase you wish to continue to work with mysql.connector.python. Not sure of logic and why this error is open for last 5 years...

Thunderous

Answer 15

[NEW] Try pip install mysqlclient if not working, and if you are getting below error

MySQLdb/_mysql.c(29): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'mysql.h': No such file or directory

Then visit this site and download the supported wheel. Now how to know the supported wheel. For example there are multiple wheel files like below:

mysqlclient-1.4.6-cp36-cp36m-win_amd64.whl

See the bold version cp36 which indicates CPython version 3.6 Just install it and this will resolve your issue.

Oh! now if you come across the another problem how to install the wheel file then just refer below line.

python -m pip install "C:\Users\Abhijit\Downloads\mysqlclient-1.4.6-cp36-cp36m-win_amd64.whl"

Windjammer

This actually solves my problem. – Windjammer

Answer 16

For now because default mysql server on Debian is MariaDB.

user@cl1-preprod ~ % mysql
Welcome to the MariaDB monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MariaDB connection id is 39

apt-get install mariadb doesn't exist. To install it you need to install this package apt-get install mariadb-server but this is only the mysql server the client is also required apt-get install mariadb-client.

Then pip install mysqlclient

user@cl1-preprod ~ % apt-get remove libmysqlclient-dev python-dev
Lecture des listes de paquets... Fait
Construction de l'arbre des dépendances
Lecture des informations d'état... Fait
Le paquet « libmysqlclient-dev » n'est pas installé, et ne peut donc être supprimé
Le paquet « python-dev » n'est pas installé, et ne peut donc être supprimé

Androsterone

Answer 17

Guidance on building on Windows systems according to the official documentation of mysqlclient: https://pypi.org/project/mysqlclient/

download the MariaDB C Connector and install it:https://mariadb.com/downloads/connectors/

Select the corresponding system and version.

The installation location is particularly important.It must be installed in the default location (usually "C:\Program Files\MariaDB\MariaDB Connector C" or "C:\Program Files (x86)\MariaDB\MariaDB Connector C" for 32-bit). If you build the connector yourself or install it in a different location, set the environment variable MYSQLCLIENT_CONNECTOR before installing.

Then pip install mysqlclient

Thermograph

Answer 18

On Windows, I ran

pip install mysqlclient

instead of

pip install pymysql

and it worked fine.

Carmine

Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please edit to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. – Seek

Answer 19

Run this command in CLI.

pip install mysqlclient

Fungal

Same answer as the one given by Aniket Sinha. – Copal