Question

I just compiled and installed mysqldb for python 2.7 on my mac os 10.6. I created a simple test file that imports

import MySQLdb as mysql

Firstly, this command is red underlined and the info tells me “Unresolved import”. Then I tried to run the following simple python code

import MySQLdb as mysql

def main():
    conn = mysql.connect( charset="utf8", use_unicode=True, host="localhost",user="root", passwd="",db="" )

if __name__ == '__main__'():
    main()

When executing it I get the following error message

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/path/to/project/Python/src/cvdv/TestMySQLdb.py", line 4, in <module>
    import MySQLdb as mysql
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-intel/egg/MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 19, in <module>
    \namespace cvdv
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-intel/egg/_mysql.py", line 7, in <module>
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-intel/egg/_mysql.py", line 6, in __bootstrap__
ImportError: dlopen(/Users/toom/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.6-intel.egg-tmp/_mysql.so, 2): Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib
  Referenced from: /Users/toom/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-macosx-10.6-intel.egg-tmp/_mysql.so
  Reason: image not found

What might be the solution to my problem?

EDIT:
Actually I found out that the library lies in /usr/local/mysql/lib. So I need to tell my pydev eclipse version where to find it. Where do I set this?

Answer 1

I solved the problem by creating a symbolic link to the library. I.e.

The actual library resides in

/usr/local/mysql/lib

And then I created a symbolic link in

/usr/lib

Using the command:

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

so that I have the following mapping:

ls -l libmysqlclient.18.dylib 
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  44 16 Jul 14:01 libmysqlclient.18.dylib -> /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib

That was it. After that everything worked fine.

EDIT:

Notice, that since MacOS El Capitan the System Integrity Protection (SIP, also known as “rootless”) will prevent you from creating links in /usr/lib/.
You could disable SIP by following these instructions, but you can create a link in /usr/local/lib/ instead:

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