From the Django documentation:

MAYBECHOICE = (
    ('y', 'Yes'),
    ('n', 'No'),
    ('u', 'Unknown'),
)

And you define a charfield in your model :

married = models.CharField(max_length=1, choices=MAYBECHOICE)

You can do the same with integer fields if you don't like to have letters in your db.

In that case, rewrite your choices:

MAYBECHOICE = (
    (0, 'Yes'),
    (1, 'No'),
    (2, 'Unknown'),
)

Using the choices parameter won't use the ENUM db type; it will just create a VARCHAR or INTEGER, depending on whether you use choices with a CharField or IntegerField. Generally, this is just fine. If it's important to you that the ENUM type is used at the database level, you have three options:

1. Use "./manage.py sql appname" to see the SQL Django generates, manually modify it to use the ENUM type, and run it yourself. If you create the table manually first, "./manage.py syncdb" won't mess with it.
2. If you don't want to do this manually every time you generate your DB, put some custom SQL in appname/sql/modelname.sql to perform the appropriate ALTER TABLE command.
3. Create a custom field type and define the db_type method appropriately.

With any of these options, it would be your responsibility to deal with the implications for cross-database portability. In option 2, you could use database-backend-specific custom SQL to ensure your ALTER TABLE is only run on MySQL. In option 3, your db_type method would need to check the database engine and set the db column type to a type that actually exists in that database.

UPDATE: Since the migrations framework was added in Django 1.7, options 1 and 2 above are entirely obsolete. Option 3 was always the best option anyway. The new version of options 1/2 would involve a complex custom migration using SeparateDatabaseAndState -- but really you want option 3.

If you really want to use your databases ENUM type:

1. Use Django 1.x
2. Recognize your application will only work on some databases.
3. Puzzle through this documentation page:http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-model-fields/#howto-custom-model-fields

Good luck!

Django 3.0 has built-in support for Enums

From the documentation:

from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _

class Student(models.Model):

    class YearInSchool(models.TextChoices):
        FRESHMAN = 'FR', _('Freshman')
        SOPHOMORE = 'SO', _('Sophomore')
        JUNIOR = 'JR', _('Junior')
        SENIOR = 'SR', _('Senior')
        GRADUATE = 'GR', _('Graduate')

    year_in_school = models.CharField(
        max_length=2,
        choices=YearInSchool.choices,
        default=YearInSchool.FRESHMAN,
    )

Now, be aware that it does not enforce the choices at a database level this is Python only construct. If you want to also enforce those value at the database you could combine that with database constraints:

class Student(models.Model):
    ...

    class Meta:
        constraints = [
            CheckConstraint(
                check=Q(year_in_school__in=YearInSchool.values),
                name="valid_year_in_school")
        ]

If you have to have enum type in MySQL table and not a "fake" enum (only visible on python side) then you can try Django-MySQL extension and its EnumField.

The models:

from django.db import models
from django_mysql.models import EnumField


class IceCreamFlavor(models.TextChoices):
    CHOCOLATE = "chocolate"
    VANILLA = "vanilla"


class IceCream(models.Model):
    price = models.DecimalField(max_digits=4, decimal_places=2)
    ice_cream_flavor = EnumField(choices=IceCreamFlavor.choices)

Resulting table:

mysql> SHOW COLUMNS IN myapp.db_icecream;
+------------------+-----------------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field            | Type                        | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+------------------+-----------------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id               | int                         | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| price            | decimal(4,2)                | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| ice_cream_flavor | enum('chocolate','vanilla') | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
+------------------+-----------------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+