ImportError: No module named MySQLdb

Question

If you're having issues compiling the binary extension, or on a platform where you cant, you can try using the pure python PyMySQL bindings.

Simply pip install pymysql and switch your SQLAlchemy URI to start like this:

SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = 'mysql+pymysql://.....'

There are some other drivers you could also try.

Or try this:

apt-get install python-mysqldb

may you try

pip install mysqlclient

My issue is :

return __import__('MySQLdb')
ImportError: No module named MySQLdb

and my resolution :

pip install MySQL-python
yum install mysql-devel.x86_64

at the very beginning, i just installed MySQL-python, but the issue still existed. So i think if this issue happened, you should also take mysql-devel into consideration. Hope this helps.

I got this issue when I was working on SQLAlchemy. The default dialect used by SQLAlchemy for MySQL is mysql+mysqldb.

engine = create_engine('mysql+mysqldb://scott:tiger@localhost/foo')

I got the "No module named MySQLdb" error when the above command was executed. To fix it I installed the mysql-python module and the issue was fixed.

sudo pip install mysql-python

It depends on Python Version as well in my experience.

If you are using Python 3, @DazWorrall answer worked fine for me.

However, if you are using Python 2, you should

sudo pip install mysql-python

which would install 'MySQLdb' module without having to change the SQLAlchemy URI.

So I spent about 5 hours trying to figure out how to deal with this issue when trying to run

./manage.py makemigrations

With Ubuntu Server LTS 16.1, a full LAMP stack, Apache2 MySql 5.7 PHP 7 Python 3 and Django 1.10.2 I really struggled to find a good answer to this. In fact, I am still not satisfied, but the ONLY solution that worked for me is this...

sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3 libmysqlclient-dev

followed by (from inside the virtual environment)

pip install mysqlclient

I really dislike having to use dev installs when I am trying to set up a new web server, but unfortunately this configuration was the only mostly comfortable path I could take.