[Python] Unable to pip install MariaDB in Python

I've been reading all the other posts somewhat related to this topic but I appear to have a slice of knowledge missing to fully comprehend the full picture.

Objective: I need to be able to access a MariaDB database on a remote server from my very simple app (local or in docker) so that I can run a couple of select scripts on the data.

I've opted to use Docker because it's cleaner and less prone to interference from my local OS, but regardless, I get the same errors on both MacOS locally and Linux on Docker.

This is my Dockerfile (the app works fine until I try to add MariaDB):

FROM python:3.8

WORKDIR /usr/src/app

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install libmariadb3 libmariadb-dev

COPY . .

RUN pip install --upgrade pip
RUN pip install --upgrade setuptools
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

EXPOSE 5000

CMD ["python", "./app.py"]


This is my requirements.txt (I don't need Flask but I just want to make sure I can see that pip is able to install something correctly, and it does):

Flask==2.0.2
mariadb==1.1.4


When I run a docker build, I get this:

RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt:
#11 1.253 Collecting Flask==2.0.2
#11 1.397 Downloading Flask-2.0.2-py3-none-any.whl (95 kB)
#11 1.441 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 95.2/95.2 kB 4.7 MB/s eta 0:00:00
#11 1.527 Collecting mariadb==1.1.4
#11 1.558 Downloading mariadb-1.1.4.zip (97 kB)
#11 1.568 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 97.4/97.4 kB 32.3 MB/s eta 0:00:00
#11 1.585 Preparing metadata (setup.py): started
#11 1.920 Preparing metadata (setup.py): finished with status 'error'
#11 1.930 error: subprocess-exited-with-error
#11 1.930
#11 1.930 × python setup.py egg_info did not run successfully.
#11 1.930 │ exit code: 1
#11 1.930 ╰─> [8 lines of output]
#11 1.930 Traceback (most recent call last):
#11 1.930 File "<string>", line 2, in <module>
#11 1.930 File "<pip-setuptools-caller>", line 34, in <module>
#11 1.930 File "/tmp/pip-install-p7s8jj6d/mariadb_90e5111808594b418ebf9c5df54e9d58/setup.py", line 27, in <module>
#11 1.930 cfg = get_config(options)
#11 1.930 File "/tmp/pip-install-p7s8jj6d/mariadb_90e5111808594b418ebf9c5df54e9d58/mariadb_posix.py", line 64, in get_config
#11 1.930 print('MariaDB Connector/Python requires MariaDB Connector/C '
#11 1.930 TypeError: not enough arguments for format string
#11 1.930 [end of output]
#11 1.930
#11 1.930 note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
#11 1.933 error: metadata-generation-failed
#11 1.933
#11 1.933 × Encountered error while generating package metadata.
#11 1.933 ╰─> See above for output.
#11 1.933
#11 1.933 note: This is an issue with the package mentioned above, not pip.
#11 1.933 hint: See above for details.
------
executor failed running [/bin/sh -c pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt]: exit code: 1


Obviously something isn't right with my MariaDB Connector/C but I don't understand what.

My understanding is that apt-get install libmariadb3 libmariadb-dev should install the right connector but apparently not(?) so when I looked into trying to install a Connector/C manually into the container before running any of the pip commands, I run into the issue that there is so much choice that I don't understand WHICH connector to download, there are literally hundreds of versions and dozens of files for each, I'm completely lost... what do I need to look for? Where do I need to look? How do I then install?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

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