Installing MariaDB and connecting it to Python on Fedora Workstation 33

2 min readMar 18, 2021

I am writing this simple article to help anyone who struggles to install all the components successfully on Linux due to errors that may occur on the way. I am going to focus on Linux Fedora, but it will be similar on all other distributions as well, just maybe some other package managers come to play.

Install MariaDB

Required fedora packages (it could be called differently on other distributions):

mariadb, mariadb-server -> contains the Mariadb client and server
mariadb-connector-c-devel -> Contains the connector

su - root # get root access
dnf install mariadb mariadb-server # Install MariaDB stuff
systemctl start mariadb # Start the server as a service
mysql_secure_installation # Install secure components
systemctl enable mariadb # Enable MariaDB service on startup

Source: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MariaDB

2. Install the required connector for pip3

We need to install a special connector component that the server requires.

dnf install mariadb-connector-c-devel

Source: https://ask.fedoraproject.org/t/mariadb-python-connector/9151

3. Install Python developer tools

So the last little hassle that I come up with and you might tackle as well is that the installation of pip3 mariadb component will complain that you don’t have a python header file Python.h. To solve this, you need to install python developer tools like such:

dnf install python3-devel  # for python3.x installs

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21530577/fatal-error-python-h-no-such-file-or-directory

4. Final part: install MariaDB connector on pip3

The pip3 is the Python 3 package manager, and it usually comes out of the box with Python and on Linux distributions. Just install the connector for Python now like such:

pip install mariadb

5. Connecting Python and MariaDB

Connection to MariaDB is well explained on the official documentation, which suggests the following:

# Import MariaDB Connector/Python module
import mariadb# Establish a connection
connection= mariadb.connect(user="myuser", database="test", host="localhost")cursor= connection.cursor()# Create a database table
cursor.execute("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS mytest")
cursor.execute("CREATE TABLE mytest(id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,"
               "first_name VARCHAR(100), last_name VARCHAR(100))")# Populate table with some data
cursor.execute("INSERT INTO mytest(first_name, last_name) VALUES (?,?)",
               ("Robert", "Redford"))# retrieve data
cursor.execute("SELECT id, first_name, last_name FROM mytest")# print content
row= cursor.fetchone()
print(*row, sep='\t')# free resources
cursor.close()
connection.close()

Source: https://mariadb-corporation.github.io/mariadb-connector-python/usage.html

If you need any help setting up MariaDB Database for the first time, please check the following article: https://mariadb.com/get-started-with-mariadb/

Installing MariaDB and connecting it to Python on Fedora Workstation 33

Written by Miha Stele