Installing Django on Leopard

Here are the steps I went through to install Django on Mac OSX Leopard:

First, I followed the steps on this page to get IDLE support (which I may or may not use, but I figured couldn’t hurt).

I then downloaded the latest official version from http://www.djangoproject.com/download/

and followed the instructions for installing from the tarball.

And that seemed to work. The tutorial works fine – I can create a new project and run a development web server. I can synchronize the database using SQLite3. However, when I try switching to MySQL, I get some nasty errors when running ‘python manage.py syncdb’. So, I found this page, which gives the precise steps needed to get python talking to MySQL correctly on Leopard.

After that, everything is apparently working! Not too horrible – just getting the MySQL connection working was a bit tricky, but otherwise, I’m now able to start working with Django.