I’ve been trying to get the Tornado Web Server setup on my Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard laptop. There are tons of dependencies it has been a pain in the ass.

Install MySQLdb python driver.

Download latest MySQL_python.

tar xzf MySQL-python-1.2.3c1.tar.gz
cd MySQL-python-1.2.3c1
python setup.py build

Build process may give you an error

EnvironmentError: mysql_config not found

This happens because your mysql installation may be non-standard. Mac OS installations are typically wacky. If you get this error figure out where your mysql_config binary resides.

I found my bin file at /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

cd MySQL-python-1.2.3c1
vim  site.cfg

In the MySQL-python site.cfg file search for these lines…

# The path to mysql_config.
# Only use this if mysql_config is not on your PATH, or you have some weird
# setup that requires it.
mysql_config = /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Replace mysql_config with your path. My executable was in a different place from where the build script thought the executable would be and the mysql_config executable was not in my resource PATH. I have a Mac 10.6 machine and I probably installed MySQL 5 using MacPorts.

Now you should be able to successfully build and install the MySQL for Python library.

python setup.py build
python setup.py install