How do I connect to a MySQL Database in Python?

Question

How do I connect to a MySQL database using a python program?

Answer 1

Stop Using MySQLDb if you want to avoid installing mysql headers just to access mysql from python.

Use pymysql. It does all of what MySQLDb does, but it was implemented purely in Python with NO External Dependencies. This makes the installation process on all operating systems consistent and easy. pymysql is a drop in replacement for MySQLDb and IMHO there is no reason to ever use MySQLDb for anything... EVER! - PTSD from installing MySQLDb on Mac OSX and *Nix systems, but that's just me.

Installation

pip install pymysql

That's it... you are ready to play.

Example usage from pymysql Github repo

import pymysql.cursors
import pymysql

# Connect to the database
connection = pymysql.connect(host='localhost',
                             user='user',
                             password='passwd',
                             db='db',
                             charset='utf8mb4',
                             cursorclass=pymysql.cursors.DictCursor)

try:
    with connection.cursor() as cursor:
        # Create a new record
        sql = "INSERT INTO `users` (`email`, `password`) VALUES (%s, %s)"
        cursor.execute(sql, ('webmaster@python.org', 'very-secret'))

    # connection is not autocommit by default. So you must commit to save
    # your changes.
    connection.commit()

    with connection.cursor() as cursor:
        # Read a single record
        sql = "SELECT `id`, `password` FROM `users` WHERE `email`=%s"
        cursor.execute(sql, ('webmaster@python.org',))
        result = cursor.fetchone()
        print(result)
finally:
    connection.close()

ALSO - Replace MySQLdb in existing code quickly and transparently

If you have existing code that uses MySQLdb, you can easily replace it with pymysql using this simple process:

# import MySQLdb << Remove this line and replace with:
import pymysql
pymysql.install_as_MySQLdb()

All subsequent references to MySQLdb will use pymysql transparently.