Setting Django up to use MySQL

I want to move away from PHP a little and learn Python. In order to do web development with Python I'll need a framework to help with templating and other things.

I have a non-production server that I use to test all of web development stuff on. It is a Debian 7.1 LAMP stack that runs MariaDB instead of the common MySQL-server package.

Yesterday I installed Django and created my first project called firstweb. I have not changed any settings yet.

Here is my first big piece of confusion. In the tutorial I followed the guy installed Django, started his first project, restarted Apache, and Django just worked from then on. He went to his browser and went to the Django default page with no problems.

Me however, I have to cd into my firstweb folder and run

python manage.py runserver myip:port 

And it works. No problem. But I'm wondering if it is supposed to work like this, and if this will cause problems down the line?

My second question is that I want to set it up so it uses my MySQL database. I go into my settings.py under /firstweb/firstweb and I see ENGINE and NAME but I'm not sure what to put here.

And then in the USER, PASSWORD, and HOST areas is this my database and its credentials? If I am using localhost can I just put localhost in the HOST area?

13 Answers

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 

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', } } 

As all said above, you can easily install xampp first from Then follow the instructions as:

1. Install and run xampp from , then start Apache Web Server and MySQL Database from the GUI.
2. You can configure your web server as you want but by default web server is at and database at port 3306, and PhpMyadmin at
3. From here you can see your databases and access them using very friendly GUI.
4. Create any database which you want to use on your Django Project.

5. Edit your settings.py file like:

   DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql', 'NAME': 'DB_NAME', 'HOST': '127.0.0.1', 'PORT': '3306', 'USER': 'root', 'PASSWORD': '', }} 

6. Install the following packages in the virtualenv (if you're using django on virtualenv, which is more preferred):

   sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev

   pip install MySQL-python

7. That's it!! you have configured Django with MySQL in a very easy way.

8. Now run your Django project:

   python manage.py migrate

   python manage.py runserver

Actually, there are many issues with different environments, python versions, so on. You might also need to install python dev files, so to 'brute-force' the installation I would run all of these:

sudo apt-get install python-dev python3-dev sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev pip install MySQL-python pip install pymysql pip install mysqlclient 

You should be good to go with the accepted answer. And can remove the unnecessary packages if that's important to you.

Run these commands

sudo apt-get install python-dev python3-dev sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev pip install MySQL-python pip install pymysql pip install mysqlclient 

Then configure settings.py like

DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql', 'NAME': 'django_db', 'HOST': '127.0.0.1', 'PORT': '3306', 'USER': 'root', 'PASSWORD': '123456', } } 

Enjoy mysql connection

1. Install mysqlclient

sudo pip3 install mysqlclient

if you get error:

Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-install-dbljg4tx/mysqlclient/

then:

 1. sudo apt install libmysqlclient-dev python-mysqldb 2. sudo pip3 install mysqlclient 

2. Modify settings.py

   DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql', 'NAME': 'website', 'USER': 'root', 'PASSWORD': '', 'HOST': '127.0.0.1', 'PORT': '3306', 'OPTION': {'init_command':"SET sql_mode='STRICT_TRANS_TABLE',"}, } } 

Andy's answer helps but if you have concern on exposing your database password in your django setting, I suggest to follow django official configuration on mysql connection:

Quoted here as:

# settings.py DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql', 'OPTIONS': { 'read_default_file': '/path/to/my.cnf', }, } } # my.cnf [client] database = NAME user = USER password = PASSWORD default-character-set = utf8 

To replace 'HOST': '127.0.0.1' in setting, simply add it in my.cnf:

# my.cnf [client] database = NAME host = HOST NAME or IP user = USER password = PASSWORD default-character-set = utf8 

Another OPTION that is useful, is to set your storage engine for django, you might want it in your setting.py:

'OPTIONS': { 'init_command': 'SET storage_engine=INNODB', } 

settings.py

DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql', 'NAME': 'django', 'USER': 'root', 'PASSWORD': '*****', 'HOST': '***.***.***.***', 'PORT': '3306', 'OPTIONS': { 'autocommit': True, }, } 

}

then:

python manage.py migrate 

if success will generate theses tables:

auth_group auth_group_permissions auth_permission auth_user auth_user_groups auth_user_user_permissions django_admin_log django_content_type django_migrations django_session 

and u will can use mysql.

this is a showcase example ,test on Django version 1.11.5: Django-pool-showcase

Follow the given steps in order to setup it up to use MySQL database:

1) Install MySQL Database Connector : sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev 2) Install the mysqlclient library : pip install mysqlclient 3) Install MySQL server, with the following command : sudo apt-get install mysql-server 4) Create the Database : i) Verify that the MySQL service is running: systemctl status mysql.service ii) Log in with your MySQL credentials using the following command where -u is the flag for declaring your username and -p is the flag that tells MySQL that this user requires a password : mysql -u db_user -p iii) CREATE DATABASE db_name; iv) Exit MySQL server, press CTRL + D. 5) Add the MySQL Database Connection to your Application: i) Navigate to the settings.py file and replace the current DATABASES lines with the following: # Database # DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql', 'OPTIONS': { 'read_default_file': '/etc/mysql/my.cnf', }, } } ... ii) Next, let’s edit the config file so that it has your MySQL credentials. Use vi as sudo to edit the file and add the following information: sudo vi /etc/mysql/my.cnf database = db_name user = db_user password = db_password default-character-set = utf8 6) Once the file has been edited, we need to restart MySQL for the changes to take effect : systemctl daemon-reload systemctl restart mysql 7) Test MySQL Connection to Application: python manage.py runserver your-server-ip:8000 

This is a considerably old question but if anyone is working on any latest versions of python and django you can follow the following steps

Note - Versions Python version - 3.9.5 Django version - 3.2.4 MySQL server version - 5.7 

After installing django, run the following command

pip install mysqlclient 

In my IDE if I do pip list this is the list of Packages and Versions

Package Version ----------- ------- asgiref 3.3.4 Django 3.2.4 mysqlclient 2.0.3 pip 21.1.2 pytz 2021.1 setuptools 57.0.0 sqlparse 0.4.1 

Now, make sure you already have created the Database schema you are going to use.

In the settings.py file of your django project under DATABASES change

DATABASES = { 'default': { 'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3', 'NAME': BASE_DIR / 'db.sqlite3', } } 

to

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 should be able to run both

python manage.py makemigrations 

and

python manage.py migrate 

You must create a MySQL database first. Then go to settings.py file and edit the 'DATABASES' dictionary with your MySQL credentials:

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

Here is a complete installation guide for setting up Django to use MySQL on a virtualenv:

python3 -m pip install mysql-connector pip install mysqlclient 

These commands helpful to settingup the mysql db in django without errors