PyTux

Trips of a curious penguin.

Hello, time traveler! You are reading an article that is almost ten years old. The world has changed, and so have I and my opinions. There is a good chance what's below is not current, correct, or secure anymore, and maybe it never was. This page is preserved because I am an archivist at heart, but you have been warned.

SQLAlchemy + MySQL + Python 3 + pip

A short PSA/reference blog post: how to make SQLAlchemy work with MySQL on Python 3, with requirements installable via pip.

tl;dr: pip https://launchpad.net/oursql/py3k/py3k-0.9.4/+download/oursql-0.9.4.zip, connection string mysql+oursql:// and Unicode everywhere.

This is a common pain of the Python 3 adopter: even if a project supports it, add-ons and testing are falling behind.

SQLAlchemy supports a number of MySQL interfaces. Most of them don’t work on Python 3 (the common MySQLdb/mysql-python will error out with ImportError: No module named 'ConfigParser') or only come as a DMG (mysql-connector – ugh).

OurSQL advertises Python 3 support, and seems an elegant/modern implementation, but installing it with pip will fail with an error that smells of Python 3 incompatibility:

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print "cython not found, using previously-cython'd .c file."
                                                           ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Turns out they maintain a branch for Python 3 support, so pointing pip at the zip below will work.

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https://launchpad.net/oursql/py3k/py3k-0.9.4/+download/oursql-0.9.4.zip

A note on Unicode: disabling Unicode or setting a charset simply won’t work (they do things as 'foo' in returned_value that breaks with Python 3 strings). Just use Unicode, it’s what you should be doing on Python 3 anyway.