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

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

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()

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

pip install mysqlclient

Use the below command to solve your issue,

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

Works on Debian

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.

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/protobuf@3.7/lib"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/protobuf@3.7/include"

edit the init.py file in your project origin directory

import pymysql

pymysql.install_as_MySQLdb()

Installing mysqlclient using anaconda is pretty simple and straight forward.

conda install -c bioconda mysqlclient

and then, install pymysql using pip.

pip install pymysql

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

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

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.

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

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…

[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"

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

On Windows, I ran

pip install mysqlclient

instead of

pip install pymysql

and it worked fine.

Run this command in CLI.

pip install mysqlclient

You have to install mysqlclient. Just ran

pip install mysqlclient