Testing Python and PostgreSQL on Windows, Part 3

As a commenter mentioned in response to Part 2, an alternative to using pip install psycopg2, which requires that you first install VC++ 2008 Express, is to download and install the Windows port, aka win-psycopg. Jason Erickson makes these builds available for several versions of Python for both 32- and 64-bit Windows.

If you’re not planning to use virtualenvs or tox (which creates virtualenvs for you), then the win-psycopg installer is the easiest way to satisfy the psycopg2 dependency (in fact, that’s how I started after the initial failure with pip). Simply download the Python 2.7 and 3.2 installers, run them and you’re done. However, the installers don’t work in a virtualenv (there is a workaround to extract the files, but I didn’t explore it because I wanted to use tox).

Another option is to build psycopg2 with the MinGW compiler. Daniele Varrazzo has a post describing this. Daniele used a special MinGW package, but I chose to install the latest (mingw-get-inst-20120426.exe) from MinGW.org (click on the Navigation – Downloads link which will take you to SourceForge).

To get the psycopg2 sources, you can download the .tar.gz package, or, since you have Git, do this from Git Bash:

git clone git://luna.dndg.it/public/psycopg2.git
cd psycopg2
git checkout 2_4_5  # or latest tag

Create a pydistutils.cfg file in your home directory (%USERPROFILE%) with the following (an alternative is to use the --compiler option to the python setup.py command below):

[build]
compiler=mingw32

Make sure MinGW, Python, and PostgreSQL are in your PATH, e.g., set PATH=C:\MinGW\bin;C:\Python27;C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.4\bin;%PATH%, and then run:

python setup.py build_ext build

With the latest MinGW and unless Python bug 12641 has been resolved, you’ll see the following error message:

cc1.exe: error: unrecognized command line option '-mno-cygwin'

The workaround is to edit the cygwincompiler.py file in your Python Lib\distutils directory and remove all instances of -mno-cygwin. Hopefully after that, the python setup.py above will work and then you can run the following to install it:

python setup.py install

Rinse and repeat for the Python 3.2 version and you should be ready to test connecting from both Python versions to PostgreSQL.

Aside: To remove the pip-installed psycopg2, you run pip uninstall psycopg2 from the corresponding Python environment. To remove win-psycopg, you use Control Panel’s Add or Remove Programs and click Remove on the desired version. To remove the versions installed with MinGW, I’m afraid you’ll have to resort to deleting the Lib\site-packages\psycopg2 directories and the related psycopg2-*.egg-info files.