I blogged previously about how to build _bsddb for Python 2.6 by hacking the Python source code to accommodate changes in berkeley-db.

Here’s an easier way that doesn’t require hacking source code.

Install berkeley-db using Homebrew:

brew install berkeley-db

Install the bsddb3 module, pointing it at an installation of berkeley-db:

sudo \
    BERKELEYDB_DIR=/usr/local/Cellar/berkeley-db/5.3.28 \
    pip-2.6 install bsddb3

Simply copy it into the appropriate place as _bsddb.so. This is super hacky and will fail if the interfaces of these two ever change, but for now for my limited purpose, it seems to work:

cp \
    /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/bsddb3/_pybsddb.so \
    /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib \
      /python2.6/lib-dynload/_bsddb.so

Enjoy:

$ python2.6
Python 2.6.7 (r267:88850, Oct 11 2012, 20:15:00)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple Clang 4.0 (tags/Apple/clang-418.0.60)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import bsddb
>>> dir(bsddb)
['MutableMapping', '_DBWithCursor', '_DeadlockWrap', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', '__package__', '__path__', '__version__', '_bsddb', '_checkflag', '_db', '_iter_mixin', '_openDBEnv', 'absolute_import', 'btopen', 'collections', 'db', 'dbutils', 'error', 'hashopen', 'os', 'ref', 'rnopen', 'sys']