Setting Django up to use MySQL

To the very first please run the below commands to install python dependencies otherwise python runserver command will throw error.

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
sudo pip install MySQL-python

Then configure the settings.py file as defined by #Andy and at the last execute :

python manage.py runserver

Have fun..!!


If you are using python3.x then Run below command

pip install mysqlclient

Then change setting.py like

DATABASES = {
'default': {
    'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
    'NAME': 'DB',
     'USER': 'username',
    'PASSWORD': 'passwd',
  }
  }

MySQL support is simple to add. In your DATABASES dictionary, you will have an entry like this:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql', 
        'NAME': 'DB_NAME',
        'USER': 'DB_USER',
        'PASSWORD': 'DB_PASSWORD',
        'HOST': 'localhost',   # Or an IP Address that your DB is hosted on
        'PORT': '3306',
    }
}

You also have the option of utilizing MySQL option files, as of Django 1.7. You can accomplish this by setting your DATABASES array like so:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'OPTIONS': {
            'read_default_file': '/path/to/my.cnf',
        },
    }
}

You also need to create the /path/to/my.cnf file with similar settings from above

[client]
database = DB_NAME
host = localhost
user = DB_USER
password = DB_PASSWORD
default-character-set = utf8

With this new method of connecting in Django 1.7, it is important to know the order connections are established:

1. OPTIONS.
2. NAME, USER, PASSWORD, HOST, PORT
3. MySQL option files.

In other words, if you set the name of the database in OPTIONS, this will take precedence over NAME, which would override anything in a MySQL option file.


If you are just testing your application on your local machine, you can use

python manage.py runserver

Adding the ip:port argument allows machines other than your own to access your development application. Once you are ready to deploy your application, I recommend taking a look at the chapter on Deploying Django on the djangobook

Mysql default character set is often not utf-8, therefore make sure to create your database using this sql:

CREATE DATABASE mydatabase CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin

If you are using Oracle's MySQL connector your ENGINE line should look like this:

'ENGINE': 'mysql.connector.django',

Note that you will first need to install mysql on your OS.

brew install mysql (MacOS)

Also, the mysql client package has changed for python 3 (MySQL-Client works only for python 2)

pip3 install mysqlclient