Python: MySQLdb and "Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.16.dylib"

Setup

In an attempt to establish a development environment for Python/Django on macOS X 10.6, MySQL was installed from the provided DMG and MySQL-python was installed using pip.

Issue

Upon attempting to import MySQLdb, the following error was encountered:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 19, in 
    import _mysql
ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/_mysql.so, 2): Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.16.dylib
  Referenced from: /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/_mysql.so
  Reason: image not found

Resolution

To address this issue, it is necessary to set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable after installing MySQL-python:

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/mysql/lib/

This variable should be set to the directory containing the MySQL libraries, which is typically /usr/local/mysql/lib/.