I installed MySQL-Python (version 1.2.3 at the time being) from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python/ on my osx 10.6, python version 2.6.1. Just do the usual “python setup.py build” and “python setup.py install”. However though, in the python cli, when I do “import MySQLdb”, I got some error.

>>> import MySQLdb
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 19, in 
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/_mysql.py", line 7, in 
  File "build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/_mysql.py", line 6, in __bootstrap__
ImportError: dlopen(/Users/birdchan/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg-tmp/_mysql.so, 2): Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib
  Referenced from: /Users/birdchan/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg-tmp/_mysql.so
  Reason: image not found
>>> 

Obviously, the error is “Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib”. A quick fix is to simply create a symlink.

sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib

I suppose you can also play with your env path.