Installing MySQLdb on MacOS Lion

  • Wed, Nov 9, 2011
  • One-minute read

I ran into an issue installing the MySQLdb module.

>>> import MySQLdb
/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg/_mysql.py:3: UserWarning: Module _mysql was already imported from /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg/_mysql.pyc, but /Users/jhaddad/Downloads/MySQL-python-1.2.3 is being added to sys.path
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in
  File "MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 19, in
    import _mysql
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.7-intel/egg/_mysql.py", line 7, in
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.7-intel/egg/_mysql.py", line 6, in __bootstrap__
ImportError: dlopen(/var/root/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg-tmp/_mysql.so, 2): Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib
  Referenced from: /var/root/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.7-intel.egg-tmp/_mysql.so
  Reason: image not found

I fixed it by doing the following:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib

sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql

I’m not sure if it matters, but I’ve got MySQL 5.5 installed.

Found the answer here - but it wasn’t the top voted one. If this is useful, vote Chris up.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4730787/python-import-mysqldb-error-mac-10-6

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