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#azure #python #web #cloud

Install mysqlclient Package on Azure Web App

When installing a wheel package you may encounter an error saying vcvarsall.bat file cannot be found.. To fix this you either need to install Visual Studio Build Tools or provide the *.whl package yourself. You probably wouldn’t want to install Visual Studio Build Tools to Azure Web App. I’m new to Azure but it seems quite easy to use and Microsoft provides a decent amount of tutorials and documentation. I did have my struggles as I’m not really an experienced web developer well I’m not even a web developer :D. So it took sometime to figure it out. It seems that adding mysqlclient>=1.3.7 to the requirements.txt file does not work because you’ll need Visual Studio Build Tools installed.

Here’s a step by step guide to how to do it.

Option 1

And as far as I know, mysql-python package is unmaintained. So you need to manually download an unofficial binary of mysqlclient from here and then download that to Azure Web App VM using Console or PowerShell and then install it manually using pip.

1- First, Windows doesn’t have a built in console program to download files and I don’t know how to use Remote Desktop for a Web App so using the Console provided by the Web App download the file with the following command. Make sure to choose the version that works for you. Azure Web App uses Python 3.4 so I’m downloading that version with x86 architecture.


pip3 download http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/dp2ng7en/mysqlclient-1.3.7-cp34-none-win32.whl

I’m putting that command but somehow pip couldn’t download that file so I had to download it my computer, upload it to cloud and get a direct link, then use that link to download the file. So, bear in mind that link might not work.

2- After the download is finished, pip3 will save it with the name uc. That might be different in your case but that’s what happened to me. So you need to rename that file to the appropriate one, which is the exact name of the file as seen on the URL above. So use the command below to change the file name.


mv .\uc .\mysqlclient-1.3.7-cp34-none-win32.whl

3- Now you are ready to install it with pip


pip3 install .\mysqlclient-1.3.7-cp34-none-win32.whl

Option 2

Download the *.whl file, say mysqlclient-1.3.7-cp34-none-win32.whl, to a folder where you configured your git repository and put the downloaded file into YOUR_PROJECT_ROOT/wheelhouse/mysqlclient-1.3.7-cp34-none-win32.whl.

Then you need to update the requirements.txt file to use the downloaded wheel file like so:

django>=1.9
djangorestframework>=3.4
wheelhouse/mysqlclient-1.3.9-cp35-cp35m-win32.whl

Make sure that you are using the latest pip.

To make sure that it’s installed, check the installed packages with pip3 list. If you see mysqlclient there, congratulations you are done! If not, you are in trouble because I didn’t get an error there so I don’t know the solution. :D But please do post it on comments so we can all learn!