Django "Illegal mix of collations" for MySQL utf8mb4 table

Question

I have reviewed other questions related to this topic, such as django python collation error

However, the solutions say to encode the table using a utf8 charset. That is not a viable solution for our modern Django app running on a utf8mb4-encoded database.

In my case, I need to enforce a charset or collation in the Django generated query, or in the DB itself, when utf-8 characters are being passed in (from a call to model.objects.get_or_create(), I believe with an emoji character being passed in one of the kwargs fields.)

I'm getting this error:

django.db.utils.OperationalError: (1267, "Illegal mix of collations (utf8mb4_unicode_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='")

Any advice welcome. Thanks!

Answer 1

In your shared_settings.py file try the following:

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        "NAME": "DBNAME",
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.mysql",
        ...
        "OPTIONS": {"charset": "utf8mb4"}
        # ^ Set the options
    }
}