How to setup MySQL Database on PythonAnyWhere.com

Hello there,
PythonAnyWhere.com is one of the platforms that allows you to easily host scripts written in python. In this post, I will show how to setup a database server on the platform and load in data from a simple python script.

There are several databases supported on the PythonAnyWhere.com platform. the common once are:-
1- SQLite (a server less database that requires not setup at all)
2- MySQL (a server based database available for free account holders)
3- PostgreSQL (a server based database available for paid account holders)

I will be using the MySQL database for this demonstration as it is the one that requires setup and is available to every on account (free and paid accounts).

Step 1:
If you haven't already, create a free account on PythonAnyWhere.com


Step 2:
Login to your account dashboard and go to the "Databases" tab. Then Create a database by specifying the Database name and MySQL password

Step 3:
After creating a Database name and MySQL password, you should have a MySQL Console added to you list of consoles under the console tab. The name will look like this: MySQL: username$dbname

Open it and you should have your MySQL console running just like mine...

Step 4:
Now, you can enter MySQL commands to interact with your MySQL database via the console. For example, lets display the databases and tables in our account by entering: show databases; and show tables;

Step 5:
To create a table, enter this query....

CREATE TABLE test_table (
id int,
member_id int,
status varchar(255)
);

The above query creates a new table named "test_table" with three fields namely; 'id', 'member_id' and 'status'. The 'id' and 'member_id' fields are integer fields while 'status' is a varchar.

Connecting your app/script:
To connect your web application or any python .py script to the database, you simply

host='username.mysql.pythonanywhere-services.com'
user='username'
pass='password'
database='username$databasename'

For example if you are using the MySQLdb module, you connection will look like this:-

conn = MySQLdb.connect(
    host='username.mysql.pythonanywhere-services.com',
    user='username',
    passwd='pass123',
    db='username$your_db_name')

That is it!
You have learned how to create a MySQL database on PythonAnyWhere.

Note: To create another database, just repeat step 2 above. Also, note that whatever database name and password you specified at that point are the credentials you will use if you a connecting to the database from an external script such as python .py script.