Connecting Python 2.7 to XAMPP MySQL Database on Windows

I installed the XAMPP package on my Windows 8.1 device, and wanted to use python 2.7 to write to the MySQL database. I found that there is the package "mysql-python" which should allow reading and writing to a MySQL DB from python, however was having problems when installing.

The error message was as follows:

    _mysql.c(42) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'config-win.h':

No such file or directory

    error: command 'C:\\Users\\re\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Common\\Microsoft\\

Visual C++ for Python\\9.0\\VC\\Bin\\cl.exe' failed with exit status 2

    ----------------------------------------

Command "C:\Python27\python.exe -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='c:\\users\\re\\appdata\\local\\temp\\pip-build-xnlpn9\\mysql-python\\setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record c:\users\re\appdata\local\temp\pip-1k03uu-record\install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile" failed with error code 1 in c:\users\re\appdata\local\temp\pip-build-xnlpn9\mysql-python

I had tried to install the mysql python connector from this website: https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/python/ however this didn't help. I'd found some posts saying that a file in the tar ball used by the pip install needed modifying, however installing the python connector above didn't seem to install any files in the directory as expected, so I wasn't able to update the tar ball to the directory that I needed.

I also tried updating the PATH and PYTHONPATH environmental variables with no luck.

The solution that worked for me eneded up being from this post on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/a/25445938

I downloaded the file from this website: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#mysql-python

I used the file MySQL_python-1.2.5-cp27-none-win32.whl and installed it using the following command:

pip install C:\MySQL_python-1.2.5-cp27-none-win32.whl

This finally installed successfully, and allowed me to the use the command "import mysql.connector" for my code.