Cannot use Django 1.8a1 with mysql.connector.python (Oracle's official mysql connector.)

[LEE U BILL]

I have Django 1.8a1 and mysql-connector-python 2.0.3 installed.

I get this error, reproducable by setting ENGINE as below in the settings.py.
And then running the command line python manage.py startapp polls

DATABASES = {

'default': {

#'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
'ENGINE': 'mysql.connector.django',

The error happens at django.apps.config.py at around line 202:
self.models_module = import_module(models_module_name)

Partial stack trace (this error is reproducable anyhow.)

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: 'mysql.connector.django' isn't an available database backend.
Try using 'django.db.backends.XXX', where XXX is one of:

u'base', u'mysql', u'oracle', u'postgresql_psycopg2', u'sqlite3'

Error was: cannot import name BaseDatabaseFeatures

My OS is Debian Wheezy.

[Tim Graham]

The connector likely hasn't been updated to be compatible with Django 1.8.

[Aymeric Augustin]

To clarify — mysql-connector-python is developed independently by Oracle. The Django team doesn't have any control over that component.

Django 1.8 is still under development. The ​documentation of mysql-connector-python doesn't say which versions of Django are supported but mentions Django 1.5 a few times.

It's unclear which versions of Django mysql-connector-python supports. You should file a bug against mysql-connector-python to support Django 1.8 and document which versions of Django are supported.

[Patrick Hagemeister]

Disclaimer: I'm aware that this is not really a issue within the django project, the comment below is just to point others having the same issue into the right direction.

---

According to a MySQL bug ticket at ​http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=76752#c437087
it seems that a django 1.8 capable version of mysql-connector-django exists:
​http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/python/
​http://cdn.mysql.com/Downloads/Connector-Python/mysql-connector-python-2.1.3.zip

However it is unfotunately not available via pypi (see ​https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mysql-connector-python).

Also when I try to install it directly via

pip install http://cdn.mysql.com/Downloads/Connector-Python/mysql-connector-python-2.1.3.zip

It fails because the installation process tries to use a new option in setuptools which my local version doesn't have:

Collecting http://cdn.mysql.com/Downloads/Connector-Python/mysql-connector-python-2.1.3.zip
  Downloading http://cdn.mysql.com/Downloads/Connector-Python/mysql-connector-python-2.1.3.zip (356kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 356kB 7.8MB/s
Installing collected packages: mysql-connector-python
  Found existing installation: mysql-connector-python 2.0.4
    Uninstalling mysql-connector-python-2.0.4:
      Successfully uninstalled mysql-connector-python-2.0.4
  Running setup.py install for mysql-connector-python
    Complete output from command /Users/patrick/.virtualenvs/ib-cms/bin/python -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/var/folders/s0/t3yxc5c16m32qzmwrsbtdybm0000gn/T/pip-0EgqCn-build/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /var/folders/s0/t3yxc5c16m32qzmwrsbtdybm0000gn/T/pip-5uIg95-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile --install-headers /Users/patrick/.virtualenvs/ib-cms/include/site/python2.7/mysql-connector-python:
    usage: -c [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]
       or: -c --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]
       or: -c --help-commands
       or: -c cmd --help

    error: option --single-version-externally-managed not recognized

I have stopped investigating this at this point because I'm unwilling to update setuptools/python because that would invole quite a bit of overhead in the environment I'm working on.

Hope this helps.

[Gerben Morsink]

Thanks a bunch!