Flask-MySQLdb

Flask-MySQLdb provides MySQL connection for Flask.

Quickstart

First, you may need to install some dependencies for mysqlclient if you don't already have them, see here.

Second, install Flask-MySQLdb:

pip install flask-mysqldb

Flask-MySQLdb depends, and will install for you, recent versions of Flask (1.0.4 or later) and mysqlclient. Flask-MySQLdb is compatible with and tested with Python 3.8+.

Next, add a MySQL instance to your code:

from flask import Flask
from flask_mysqldb import MySQL

app = Flask(__name__)

# Required
app.config["MYSQL_USER"] = "user"
app.config["MYSQL_PASSWORD"] = "password"
app.config["MYSQL_DB"] = "database"
# Extra configs, optional:
app.config["MYSQL_CURSORCLASS"] = "DictCursor"
app.config["MYSQL_CUSTOM_OPTIONS"] = {"ssl": {"ca": "/path/to/ca-file"}}  # https://mysqlclient.readthedocs.io/user_guide.html#functions-and-attributes

mysql = MySQL(app)

@app.route("/")
def users():
    cur = mysql.connection.cursor()
    cur.execute("""SELECT user, host FROM mysql.user""")
    rv = cur.fetchall()
    return str(rv)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True)

Other configuration directives can be found here.

Why would you want to use this extension versus just using MySQLdb by itself? The only reason is that the extension was made using Flask's best practices in relation to resources that need caching on the app context. What that means is that the extension will manage creating and teardown the connection to MySQL for you while with if you were just using MySQLdb you would have to do it yourself.