How can I use Django with MySQL in MAMP stack?

Question

Hi all,

I have difficulty especially in installing MySQLdb module (MySQL-python-1.2.3c1), to connect to the MySQL in MAMP stack. I've done a number of things such as copying the mysql include directory and library (including plugin) from a fresh installation of mysql (version 5.1.47) to the one inside MAMP (version 5.1.37).

Now, the MySQLdb module build and install doesnt give me error.

The error happens when I'm calling 'import MySQLdb' from python shell (version 2.6).

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 19, in <module>

  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/_mysql.py", line 7, in <module>
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/_mysql.py", line 6, in __bootstrap__
ImportError: dlopen(/Users/rhenru/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg-tmp/_mysql.so, 2): Symbol not found: _mysql_affected_rows
  Referenced from: /Users/rhenru/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg-tmp/_mysql.so
  Expected in: flat namespace
 in /Users/rhenru/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg-tmp/_mysql.so

Any idea, what else do I need to do to make it works?

Thanks a bunch, Robert

========= Add the system response after using virtualenv as suggested by Hank Gay below...

(MyDjangoProject)MyMacPro:MyDjangoProject rhenru$ which python
/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/bin/python

After I run python in virtualenv, importing MySQLdb:

>>> import MySQLdb
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 19, in <module>

  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/_mysql.py", line 7, in <module>
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/_mysql.py", line 6, in __bootstrap__
ImportError: dlopen(/Users/rhenru/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg-tmp/_mysql.so, 2): Symbol not found: _mysql_affected_rows
  Referenced from: /Users/rhenru/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg-tmp/_mysql.so
  Expected in: flat namespace
 in /Users/rhenru/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg-tmp/_mysql.so

import sys and sys.path

>>> import sys
>>> print sys.path
['', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6/site-packages/distribute-0.6.10-py2.6.egg', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pip-0.7.1-py2.6.egg', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python26.zip', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/PyXML-0.8.4-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pydot-1.0.2-py2.6.egg', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pyparsing-1.5.2-py2.6.egg', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/vobject-0.8.1c-py2.6.egg', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pytz-2010h-py2.6.egg', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3c1-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/distribute-0.6.12-py2.6.egg', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/pip-0.7.1-py2.6.egg', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6/plat-darwin', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6/plat-mac', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/Extras/lib/python', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6/lib-tk', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6/lib-old', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6/lib-dynload', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/plat-darwin', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/lib-tk', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/plat-mac', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages', '/Users/rhenru/Workspace/django/MyDjangoProject/lib/python2.6/site-packages', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/PIL', '/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg-info', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/PyObjC', '/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/Extras/lib/python/wx-2.8-mac-unicode']

Answer 1

How are you installing MySQL-Python? I just tested in a fresh virtualenv and pip install mysql-python seems to have done the trick.

UPDATE:

pip is sort of like a package manager for Python packages.

By default, pip installs to your current site-packages directory, which is on your $PYTHONPATH. This lets other libraries/applications (like Django) access it. pip also works well with virtualenv (it should; Ian Bicking wrote them both), which is a nifty library that lets you sandbox an application. This is nice because it means you can try out new things without polluting (or even needing write access to) the global site-packages directory.

It probably seems like yak-shaving right now, but I'd say it's worth the effort to get up to speed on pip and virtualenv (you may also want to look into virtualenvwrapper, but we'll skip that for now; it's just sugar for virtualenv). It will lead to a slightly more complicated deployment scenario than putting everything in the global site-packages, but for development it's really no harder, and there are lots of good guides to deploying using a virtualenv.

I'd recommend something like the following:

1. curl -0 http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
2. python distribute_setup.py
3. easy_install pip
4. pip install virtualenv
5. virtualenv --distribute MyDjangoProject
6. cd MyDjangoProject
7. source bin/activate (this activates the sandbox that virtualenv created)
8. pip install django mysql-python

At this point, you should have a totally functional Django+MySQL install (if I missed any steps, just comment and I'll try to add it in). You can start your Django project like this: django-admin.py startproject MyDjangoProject. cd into your project's directory, edit your settings.py file to point to your MySQL database, and run the dev server to test it out like so: ./manage.py runserver (you may need to chmod u+x your manage.py file). Voila! You should be able to access your site on localhost:8000. When you're done working on the project, you can just use deactivate to exit the virtualenv sandbox.

Try not to hold all this against Django: a lot of it is just best practices stuff for working with Python libraries. You could get by with a lot less, but this way it's more reproducible and you're less likely to accidentally mess up one of this project's dependencies when working on a different project.