How To Use MySQL or MariaDB with your Django Application on Ubuntu 14.04

Introduction #

Django is a flexible framework for quickly creating Python applications. By default, Django applications are configured to store data into a lightweight SQLite database file. While this works well under some loads, a more traditional DBMS can improve performance in production.
In this guide, we’ll demonstrate how to install and configure MySQL or MariaDB to use with your Django applications. We will install the necessary software, create database credentials for our application, and then start and configure a new Django project to use this backend.

Prerequisites #

To get started, you will need a clean Ubuntu 14.04 server instance with a non-root user set up. The non-root user must be configured with sudo privileges. Learn how to set this up by following our initial server setup guide.
When you are ready to continue, read on.

Install the Components from the Ubuntu Repositories #

Our first step will be install all of the pieces that we need from the repositories. We will install pip, the Python package manager, in order to install and manage our Python components. We will also install the database software and the associated libraries required to interact with them.
We will cover both MySQL and MariaDB below, so choose the section associated with the DBMS you’d like to use.

MySQL #

If you want to use MySQL, the following apt commands will get you the packages you need:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev

You will be asked to select and confirm a password for the administrative MySQL account.
After the installation, you can create the database directory structure by typing:

sudo mysql_install_db

You can then run through a simple security script by running:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

You’ll be asked for the administrative password you set for MySQL during installation. Afterwards, you’ll be asked a series of questions. Besides the first question which asks you to choose another administrative password, select yes for each question.
With the installation and initial database configuration out of the way, we can move on to create our database and database user. Skip ahead to the next section.

MariaDB #

If you prefer MariaDB, you can follow the instructions below to install it and perform the necessary initial configuration. Install the packages from the repositories by typing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev mariadb-server libmariadbclient-dev libssl-dev

You will be asked to select and confirm a password for the administrative MariaDB account.
You can then run through a simple security script by running:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

You’ll be asked for the administrative password you set for MariaDB during installation. Afterwards, you’ll be asked a series of questions. Besides the first question, asking you to choose another administrative password, select yes for each question.
With the installation and initial database configuration out of the way, we can move on to create our database and database user.

Create a Database and Database User #

The remainder of this guide can be followed as-is regardless of whether you installed MySQL or MariaDB.
We can start by logging into an interactive session with our database software by typing the following (the command is the same regardless of which database software you are using):

mysql -u root -p

You will be prompted for the administrative password you selected during installation. Afterwards, you will be given a prompt.
First, we will create a database for our Django project. Each project should have its own isolated database for security reasons. We will call our database myproject in this guide, but it’s always better to select something more descriptive. We’ll set the default type for the database to UTF-8, which is what Django expects:

CREATE DATABASE myproject CHARACTER SET UTF8;

Remember to end all commands at an SQL prompt with a semicolon.
Next, we will create a database user which we will use to connect to and interact with the database. Set the password to something strong and secure:

CREATE USER myprojectuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Now, all we need to do is give our database user access rights to the database we created:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON myproject.* TO myprojectuser@localhost;

Flush the changes so that they will be available during the current session:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Exit the SQL prompt to get back to your regular shell session:

exit

Install Django within a Virtual Environment #

Now that our database is set up, we can install Django. For better flexibility, we will install Django and all of its dependencies within a Python virtual environment.
You can get the virtualenv package that allows you to create these environments by typing:

sudo pip install virtualenv

Make a directory to hold your Django project. Move into the directory afterwards:

mkdir ~/myproject
cd ~/myproject

We can create a virtual environment to store our Django project’s Python requirements by typing:

virtualenv myprojectenv

This will install a local copy of Python and pip into a directory called myprojectenv within your project directory.
Before we install applications within the virtual environment, we need to activate it. You can do so by typing:

source myprojectenv/bin/activate

Your prompt will change to indicate that you are now operating within the virtual environment. It will look something like this (myprojectenv)user@host:~/myproject$.
Once your virtual environment is active, you can install Django with pip. We will also install the mysqlclient package that will allow us to use the database we configured:

pip install django mysqlclient

We can now start a Django project within our myproject directory. This will create a child directory of the same name to hold the code itself, and will create a management script within the current directory. Make sure to add the dot at the end of the command so that this is set up correctly:

django-admin.py startproject myproject .

Configure the Django Database Settings #

Now that we have a project, we need to configure it to use the database we created.
Open the main Django project settings file located within the child project directory:

nano ~/myproject/myproject/settings.py

Towards the bottom of the file, you will see a DATABASES section that looks like this:

. . .

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
    }
}

. . .

This is currently configured to use SQLite as a database. We need to change this so that our MySQL/MariaDB database is used instead.
First, change the engine so that it points to the mysql backend instead of the sqlite3 backend. For the NAME, use the name of your database (myproject in our example). We also need to add login credentials. We need the username, password, and host to connect to. We’ll add and leave blank the port option so that the default is selected:

. . .

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'NAME': 'myproject',
        'USER': 'myprojectuser',
        'PASSWORD': 'password',
        'HOST': 'localhost',
        'PORT': '',
    }
}

. . .

When you are finished, save and close the file.

Migrate the Database and Test your Project #

Now that the Django settings are configured, we can migrate our data structures to our database and test out the server.
We can begin by creating and applying migrations to our database. Since we don’t have any actual data yet, this will simply set up the initial database structure:

cd ~/myproject
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

After creating the database structure, we can create an administrative account by typing:

python manage.py createsuperuser

You will be asked to select a username, provide an email address, and choose and confirm a password for the account.
Once you have an admin account set up, you can test that your database is performing correctly by starting up the Django development server:

python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

In your web browser, visit your server’s domain name or IP address followed by :8000 to reach default Django root page:

http://server_domain_or_IP:8000

You should see the default index page:

Append /admin to the end of the URL and you should be able to access the login screen to the admin interface:

Enter the username and password you just created using the createsuperuser command. You will then be taken to the admin interface:

When you’re done investigating, you can stop the development server by hitting CTRL-C in your terminal window.
By accessing the admin interface, we have confirmed that our database has stored our user account information and that it can be appropriately accessed.

Conclusion #

In this guide, we’ve demonstrated how to install and configure MySQL or MariaDB as the backend database for a Django project. While SQLite can easily handle the load during development and light production use, most projects benefit from implementing a more full-featured DBMS.