Setting Django up to use MySQL

Question

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?

Answer 1

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',

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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