Connecting to MYSQL with Python 2 in three steps
1 - Setting
You must install a MySQL driver before doing anything. Unlike PHP, Only the SQLite driver is installed by default with Python. The most used package to do so is MySQLdb but it's hard to install it using easy_install. Please note MySQLdb only supports Python 2.
For Windows user, you can get an exe of MySQLdb.
For Linux, this is a casual package (python-mysqldb). (You can use sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb
(for debian based distros), yum install MySQL-python
(for rpm-based), or dnf install python-mysql
(for modern fedora distro) in command line to download.)
For Mac, you can install MySQLdb using Macport.
2 - Usage
After installing, Reboot. This is not mandatory, But it will prevent me from answering 3 or 4 other questions in this post if something goes wrong. So please reboot.
Then it is just like using any other package :
#!/usr/bin/python
import MySQLdb
db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost", # your host, usually localhost
user="john", # your username
passwd="megajonhy", # your password
db="jonhydb") # name of the data base
# you must create a Cursor object. It will let
# you execute all the queries you need
cur = db.cursor()
# Use all the SQL you like
cur.execute("SELECT * FROM YOUR_TABLE_NAME")
# print all the first cell of all the rows
for row in cur.fetchall():
print row[0]
db.close()
Of course, there are thousand of possibilities and options; this is a very basic example. You will have to look at the documentation. A good starting point.
3 - More advanced usage
Once you know how it works, You may want to use an ORM to avoid writing SQL manually and manipulate your tables as they were Python objects. The most famous ORM in the Python community is SQLAlchemy.
I strongly advise you to use it: your life is going to be much easier.
I recently discovered another jewel in the Python world: peewee. It's a very lite ORM, really easy and fast to setup then use. It makes my day for small projects or stand alone apps, Where using big tools like SQLAlchemy or Django is overkill :
import peewee
from peewee import *
db = MySQLDatabase('jonhydb', user='john', passwd='megajonhy')
class Book(peewee.Model):
author = peewee.CharField()
title = peewee.TextField()
class Meta:
database = db
Book.create_table()
book = Book(author="me", title='Peewee is cool')
book.save()
for book in Book.filter(author="me"):
print book.title
This example works out of the box. Nothing other than having peewee (pip install peewee
) is required.
I once had this problem and solved it by installing mysql-server
, so make sure that you have installed the mysql-server
, not the mysql-client
or something else.
That error means the file /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
doesn't exists, if you didn't install mysql-server
, then the file would not exist. So in that case, install it with
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
But if the mysql-server
is already installed and is running, then you need to check the config files.
The config files are:
/etc/my.cnf
/etc/mysql/my.cnf
/var/lib/mysql/my.cnf
In /etc/my.cnf
, the socket file config may be /tmp/mysql.sock
and in /etc/mysql/my.cnf
the socket file config may be /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
. So, remove or rename /etc/mysql/my.cnf
, let mysql use /etc/my.cnf
, then the problem may solved.
Best Answer
That could mean that MYSQL is down or you use the wrong host name while connect. One more possible reason for that could be difference in socket configuration of php against mysql, you can check it in by looking at entry socket in mysql config. file and by looking at output of phpinfo(), you need just to compare it. Or it could that someone else on your machine also using that socket.
PS. As well my wild guess, go through your code and check you always get your connection close right and all your queries as well.