Configure Django And MySQL Database

In this post, I will show you how to set up Django with MySQL database. This tutorial assumes you already have MySQL installed on your computer. Django comes with a default SQLite database that does not require any setup. SQLite databases are not good for large scale applications therefore, it is recommended you use a secure database like MySQL for your projects. Mysql is not free software but it has a free community version you can download from here.

When you first install MySQL, it comes with a default root user. In some cases, you will be required to set a password for the root user; in others, you will not. It is not recommended to use MySQL's root user, so we are going to create a new user and grant the user the privileges from the root user.

Setup MySQL

Enter the MySQL shell with the following command

mysql -u root

If you configured a password during your installation you use the command below. This will show you a prompt where you can now enter your password.

mysql -u root -p

If you are using ubuntu or Debian Linux and the above commands did not work for you use:

sudo mysql

Create the database

CREATE DATABASE mydb;

Create a new user with a password.

CREATE USER 'dapo'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Grant privileges to your new user

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mydb.* TO 'dapo'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;

This command will allow the user have full access to the database mydb.

Then finally use the flush command to refresh.

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Setup Django

Before we can configure our Django app with MySQL first we need the following packages:

mysqlclient
django-environ

mysqlclient

This is the package that allows MySQL to communicate with our Django server if you do not have it then your Django app will not run.

Install command:

pip install mysqlclient

django-environ

This is a package that allows us to manage environment variables easily, using a .env file. This package makes configuring MySQL with Django easy.

Install command:

pip install django-environ

After you have installed the packages create a file called .env beside the settings.py file in your Django project.

django_project/
|-- django_project/
|   |-- .env
|   |-- settings.py
|   |-- urls.py
|   |-- wsgi.py
|   `-- __init__.py

Inside the .env file create an environment variable DATABASE_URL with the connection string as the value

DATABASE_URL=mysql://dapo:password@localhost/mydb

Import the environ module and load the environment variable inside of the settings.py.

import environ

# Load the environment variable inside python
env = environ.Env()
environ.Env.read_env()

Finally, use the env variable to load the database configuration inside of the DATABASES python dictionary located inside settings.py file.

# The database configuration will be generated from
# the connection string in the .env file
DATABASES = {
  'default': env.db()
}

The env.db() function will generate the configuration dictionary for MySQL with the DATABASE_URL environment variable.

{
  'NAME': 'mydb', 
  'USER': 'dapo', 
  'PASSWORD': 'password', 
  'HOST': 'localhost', 
  'PORT': 3306, 
  'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql'
}

You can connect to MySQL database hosted on another server. Change the HOST from localhost to the server's HOST name and set the PORT the server is using. The default PORT for MySQL is 3306. This is what most servers will use.

If you have reached the end of this article, You should be able to use django-environ to setup Django and MySQL. I know you can, because its not difficult.