Building MySQLdb for Python on Windows

 

Building MySQLdb for Python on Windows

MySQLdb is perhaps the most widely used interface between python and MySQL. Sadly for the python developers on Windows, there are no official pre-built binaries for MySQLdb for window. You are expected to build for your own system using the scripts provided.

As almost always is the case, this path is fraught with problems. I have documented below the problems I ran into while building MySQLdb myself.

System:

• Win32 (XP)
• Microsoft Visual C++ compiler
• MySQL developer build: to install this make sure that you select the “C headers\libs” option on the installation configuration page (this usually is the first page of the wizard). If you do not have these components installed you will see errors like this: _mysql.c(34) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: ‘config-win.h’: No such file or directory
  error: command ‘”C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\BIN\cl.exe”‘ failed with exit
  status 2

• setuptools.py: get the installer from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools

Steps to install:

1. open site.cfg and  look for the line: registry_key = SOFTWARE\MySQL AB\MySQL Server 5.0, update it for your version of MySQL, I changed it to registry_key = SOFTWARE\MySQL AB\MySQL Server 5.1
2. run python setup.py build
3. if you get error like this:

   build\temp.win32-2.6\Release\_mysql.pyd.manifest : general error c1010070: Faile
   d to load and parse the manifest. The system cannot find the file specified.
   error: command ‘mt.exe’ failed with exit status 31

   As suggested here do the following:

   • go to C:\Program Files\Python26\Lib\distutils or a similar path depending on where your target python version is installed
   • open the file msvc9compiler.py and look for MANIFESTFILE, you should see the following line
     ld_args.append(’/MANIFESTFILE:’ + temp_manifest)
   • Add another line just after this one
     ld_args.append(’/MANIFEST’)
4. run python setup.py bdist_wininst . Thus will give you an executable in the \dist directory, run this .exe file and get going!