The eflow blog

I’m in the middle of moving OpenMRS’s web presence from a shared virtual machine to a new dedicated box.  The only trouble I ran into was with the mysql python module (again).

For posterity’s sake, I’m going to write my solution here.

easy_install mysql-python

I received this error when trying to install the MySQLdb-python module into python on centOS:

_mysql.c:2808: error: expected declaration specifiers before ‘init_mysql’
_mysql.c:2886: error: expected ‘{’ at end of input
error: Setup script exited with error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

The fix I remembered.  I just had to install the python development packages:

yum install python-devel

I then had another very odd and strangely familiar error:

In file included from _mysql.c:35:
/usr/include/mysql/my_config.h:15:28: error: my_config_i386.h: No such file or directory
error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

Googling around gave me nothing helpful…in fact the results looked strangely familiar as well.  I couldn’t remember the solution to this one though.

Eventually, I actually read the error message and realized that our new vm isn’t an x64 box.  For some reason there was a my_config_x64.h file in /usr/include/mysql but there wasn’t a my_config_i386.h.  Luckily, that file was present on the old server. Copying that file from /usr/include/mysql on the old box to the new was the cure.

This is in the babble category tagged as centos, gcc, mysql, python

7 comments »

7 Responses

1. Olivier Biot Says:
   May 18th, 2009 at 7:29 am

   Thanks for this information!

   For the record, apparently the MySQLDB Python package in CentOS has a Mixed Case name: “MySQL-python”. The command to install this module on CentOS is:

   $ yum install MySQL-python

   Hope this helps!

   Olivier

2. Evlilik Sitesi Says:
   January 19th, 2010 at 11:53 am

   Awesome awesome post!!!

   I’ve been trying to install mysqldb for the last hour on my centos box and had countless errors before I read the comment on this post. I had no clue I could yum MySQL-python.

   It worked like a charm. Thanks Olivier and eflow!

3. Elchin J Says:
   February 11th, 2010 at 12:27 pm

   Thanks Olivier! I would never imagine that the name of MySQLdb api in CentOS is like MySQL-python. It solved my problem! Great!

4. kadimi Says:
   March 20th, 2010 at 10:38 pm

   I was getting similar error, Installing python-devel fixed it for me.

   Thanks

5. vinh Says:
   March 22nd, 2010 at 5:03 am

   I had installed MySQL-python on using
   $ yum install MySQL-python
   but when i used command
   import MySQLdb. it still not library in my machine
   i use Linux CentOS and using x86_64
   Please help me by send email to me:
   tuanvinh100@gmail.com
   thanks so much

6. Ben Says:
   March 22nd, 2010 at 12:45 pm

   Make sure you have installed python-devel (as the blog post says)

7. DDevine Says:
   May 31st, 2010 at 2:09 am

   You may also have to install mysql-devel — this was my issue (on CentOS 5.5).

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