Sylvain Zimmer

Like many others, I struggled for a good hour to install the recommended MySQL module for Python, which is MySQLdb. So I’m sharing here the solution I found

The latest MAMP (1.7.1) uses MySQL 5.0.41, and MacOS X Leopard (10.5) uses Python 2.5.1 . As I couldn’t find a prebuilt MySQLdb binary for those versions, well, I had to compile my own.

So let’s go for it :

• Download an old copy of mysql 5.0.41
• Download the latest MySQLdb


$ tar zxvf mysql-5.0.41.tar.gz
$ cd mysql-5.0.41
$ ./configure && make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..

(now MySQL is installed in /usr/local/)

$ tar zxvf MySQLdb...
$ cd MySQLdb...

• In the MySQLdb folder, edit the file _mysql.c
  • Delete the following lines :
    

    #ifndef uint
    #define uint unsigned int
    #endif

  • Replace 2 occurences of “uint” by “unsigned int”
• Then edit the site.cfg file, and set the mysql_config variable to “/usr/local/bin/mysql_config”


(Still in the MySQLdb folder)

$ python setup.py clean
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ sudo rm /tmp/mysql.sock
$ sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock


And that’s it! You should now be able to “import MySQLdb” in python. Good luck!