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

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()

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

Use the below command to solve your issue,

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

Works on Debian