Django 2.0 (currently alpha) requires mysqlclient 1.3.3 or above (source code).

version = Database.version_info
if version < (1, 3, 3):
    raise ImproperlyConfigured("mysqlclient 1.3.3 or newer is required; you have %s" % Database.__version__)

The shim in PyMySQL is now too low.

# we include a doctored version_info here for MySQLdb compatibility
version_info = (1,2,6,"final",0)

Is it possible to increase the shim to 1.3.3 or later so that Django doesn't complain? I'm not a user of PyMySQL so I'm not aware of the implications of making this change, I just saw this question on Stack Overflow.