How to pass secure_auth to MySQL login via SQLalchemy - mysql

Question

I'm working on the front end of a webapp, and my co-developer is using Pyramid and SQAlchemy. We've just moved from SQLite to MySQL. I installed MySQL 5.6.15 (via Homebrew) on my OS X machine to get the Python MySQLdb install to work (via pip in a virtualenv).
Because in MySQL >= 5.6.5 secure_auth is now ON by default I can only connect to the remote database (pre 5.6.5) with the --skip-secure-auth flag, which works fine in a terminal.
However, in the Python Pyramid code, it only seems possible to add this flag as an argument to create_engine(), but I can't find create_engine() in my co-dev's code, only the connection string below in an initialisation config file. He's not available, this isn't my area of expertise, and we launch next week :(
sqlalchemy.url = mysql+mysqldb://gooddeeds:deeds808letme1now#146.227.24.38/gooddeeds_development?charset=utf8
I've tried appending various "secure auth" strings to the above with no success. Am I looking in the wrong place? Has MySQLdb set secure_auth to ON because I'm running MySQL 5.6.15? If so, how can I change that?

Answer 1

If you are forced to use the old passwords (bah!) when using MySQL 5.6, and using MySQLdb with SQLAlchemy, you'll have to add the --skip-secure-auth to an option file and use URL:
from sqlalchemy.engine.url import URL
..
dialect_options = {
'read_default_file': '/path/to/your/mysql.cnf',
}
engine = create_engine(URL(
'mysql',
username='..', password='..',
host='..', database='..',
query=dialect_options
))
The mysql.cnf would contain:
[client]
skip-secure-auth
For Pyramid, you can do the following. Add a line in your configuration ini-file that holds the connection arguments:
sqlalchemy.url = mysql://scott:tiger#localhost/test
sqlalchemy.connect_args = { 'read_default_file': '/path/to/foo' }
Now you need to change a bit the way the settings are read and used. In the file that launches your Pyramic app, do the following:
def main(global_config, **settings):
try:
settings['sqlalchemy.connect_args'] = eval(settings['sqlalchemy.connect_args'])
except KeyError:
settings['sqlalchemy.connect_args'] = {}
engine = engine_from_config(settings, 'sqlalchemy.')
# rest of code..
The trick is to evaluate the string in the ini file which contains a dictionary with the extra options for the SQLAlchemy dialect.