Installation instruction for macOS

[HHangLi]

The documentation said the required steps:

# For Mac, OpenSSL is a pre-requisite - skip if already present
brew install openssl
pip install mssql-python

However, in my environment (macOS 26.5.1, almost fresh installation), I also need to install unixodbc to make it workable.

brew install unixodbc

[github-actions]

Hi @HHangLi, thank you for opening this issue!

Our team will review it shortly. We aim to triage all new issues within 24-48 hours and get back to you.

If you have additional information to share, please feel free to update the issue.

Thank you for your patience!

[bewithgaurav]

@HHangLi - thanks for flagging, and for adding the unixodbc workaround.

we've closely inspected that this is a bug in the wheel packaging, and not a docs gap
on Apple Silicon the bundled driver points at an absolute Homebrew path instead of the copy we ship inside the package:

/opt/homebrew/lib/libodbcinst.2.dylib

on a clean machine that path doesn't exist, so the import fails until brew install unixodbc creates it. that's exactly why the workaround fixes it

this regressed in 1.8.0 in our lib upgrade PR (#569), 1.7.1 and everything before is clean on Apple Silicon - so pinning mssql-python==1.7.1 is also an alternative to installing unixodbc.

I need one confirmation before I close the loop: what does uname -m print on your system?

• arm64 = Apple Silicon, this is the bug I'm describing here
• x86_64 = Intel, that wheel isn't affected, so you'd be hitting something adjacent and I'd want a bit more detail

the fix we'll be raising configures the bundled driver to load its dependencies from inside the package on both architectures, not just the one the release machine runs
you already have a workaround, so nothing blocking I assume, we'll be fixing this as a part of our next release (1.11.0)

thanks again for your valuable contribution - we'll post updates as we go