Installing MySQL Python Module on Ubuntu

After tearing through several other Django books and tutorials using sqlite3 as the database, I'm starting to go through the book Beginning Django E-Commerce and it uses MySQL as the database. I use MySQL quite a lot so that side of things isn't an issue, but I did run into a couple of wrinkles getting MySQL and Django playing nice so I thought I'd share.

Basically if after configuring your database in settings.py and running python manage.py dbshell you get a bunch of errors, you have a minor amount of installation work to do to get things rolling.

First thing I did was install pip, which is a better version of/replacement for easy_install:

sudo easy_install pip

Next I ran pip upgrade for good measure (probably not necessary but can't hurt, and worth running if you already had pip installed):

sudo pip install pip --upgrade

On my machine (Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit) I also had to build the dependencies for the python-mysqldb libraries:

sudo apt-get build-dep python-mysqldb

And finally with that in place you can use pip to install the Python MySQL libraries:

sudo pip install MySQL-python

If everything worked you should now be able to run python manage.py dbshell from your Django project and have it load up the MySQL console.