Fixing ‘pip install MySQL-python’ Error on MacOS

mysql-connectormysql-pythonpython

I have looked all over the internet including here. I have tried all the suggested solutions, but none of them worked.
Here is the error message I get _mysql.c:44:10: fatal error: 'my_config.h' file not found

Could the problem come from the fact that my MySQL and Python versions are not compatible?
MySql version:Ver 8.0.21 for osx10.15 on x86_64 (Homebrew)
Python version:Python 2.7.16

Could that simply be it?
Thanks!

Best Answer

This solution is for macOS users

After struggling a while on this issue I finally solved it, and it was pretty simple in the end. Maybe this will help others too, because I have seen this issue around a lot during my research. There are plenty of solutions out there, that worked for some and not for others. None of them worked for me.

Before you go into a copy/paste of commands rampage in your terminal, you might want to check your MySQL version. Because apparently MySQL only supports the MySQL-python dependency until version 5.7. So I just had to downgrade my MySQL 8 to 5.7, and then I could finally run the pip install MySQL-python command, and it worked!

So if you have a MySQL version higher than 5.7, you might want to downgrade. To that, type in these commands in your terminal:

brew unlink mysql

brew install [email protected]

Then, try mysql --version If mysql is still red, run this command:

export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/mysql/bin

And you should finally be able to run:

pip install MySQL-python

This worked for me, hope it will for you!

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