PyMySQL Best Practices

PyMySQL is a pure-Python MySQL client library implementing the DB-API 2.0 specification (PEP 249). It supports MySQL >= 5.7 and MariaDB >= 10.3 on Python >= 3.7.

Installation

pip install PyMySQL

# For SHA-256 / caching_sha2_password authentication:
pip install "PyMySQL[rsa]"

Establishing a Connection

Use pymysql.connect() as the entry point. Always specify charset='utf8mb4' and use context managers to guarantee cleanup.