MongoDB Installation

MongoDB is a cross-platform database, and the current version supports a variety of operating systems—pretty much all main Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and OSX.

As the idea of this book was to use Microsoft.NET and MongoDB, we will only briefly touch on Linux installation as a reference, and we will mainly concentrate on running and configuring MongoDB on Microsoft Windows. While all concepts apply equally on every platform, it’s not in the scope of this book to get into particular platform details.

For Mac and Windows platforms, you can download MongoDB and install it directly from the
project website.

In this book, we will be covering the MongoDB Community Server, which is a free version of MongoDB.

Installation on Windows (single node)

Examples in this book were tested in Microsoft Windows 10; the exact version downloaded and used is version 3.4.1 for “Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit and later, with SSL support x64.”

MongoDB can run as a standalone application or as a Windows service. For learning purposes, it is interesting to see MongoDB running as the standalone application (console), as it outputs some debug information that can be useful. Otherwise, on production systems, it’s highly recommended to run it as a Windows service.

MongoDB installation

1. Install the MongoDB by double-clicking on the downloaded file. Follow the installer instructions and choose the custom installation.

1. Install MongoDB in the c:\mongodb folder. (You can choose any folder you like; for this book’s purpose, I’ve chosen this path.)
2. Choose all the features available.

2. We need to manually create the directory where the database data will reside. The default location where MongoDB will place the files is c:\data\db, so, let’s just keep these default settings and create the folder by running md c:\data\db on the command line. The location of this folder can be changed by using the --dbpath option when starting the database.
3. The same thing applies to the application logs. The default place that MongoDB will be looking at is c:\data\log. So, let’s run the md c:\data\log on the command line. This option can be controlled by using the --logpath option. Let’s use the default and create this folder.

Running MongoDB as a standalone application

Starting the database is as simple as running the following command.

Code Listing 3: Starting MongoDB

After running this command (which stands for “mongo daemon”) for the first time, you might be asked to open the firewall. Accept this option.

The output will be similar to the following in Figure 7, from which we may learn quite a few things (as highlighted).

• MongoDB operates by default on port: 27017.
• The database engine used by default is wiredTiger.
• Logs are enabled.
• Last message: “waiting for connections on port 27017” means that the database is ready to be used.

Figure 7: Starting MongoDB.

Installing MongoDB as a Windows service

By running the following command, where we specify explicitly where to place the logs, we will install MongoDB as a Windows Service. Make sure to run the command prompt with administrator rights.

In order to install MongoDB on Windows as a service, keeping the previously used settings is as simple as adding the --install parameter and the location of the log specified by the value of --logpath.

Code Listing 4: Installing MongoDB as a Windows service

If the installation is successful, you will see MongoDB in the Windows Services panel, as shown in Figure 8.

For more information about installing MongoDB on Windows with the full option list, see this tutorial.

Figure 8: MongoDB service after complete installation.

Single node installation on Linux (Ubuntu)

Here we will demonstrate how to install MongoDB on Ubuntu (version 16.04 at the time of writing) by using the popular apt package management tool.

Using the terminal window, let’s follow the following steps:

1. Import the public key used by the apt package manager.

Code Listing 5: Importing the public key

2. Create a list file for MongoDB.

Code Listing 6: List file creation

3. Reload local package database.

Code Listing 7: Reload local package database

4. Install the MongoDB package.

At this step, after preparing the apt package manager, we can install the latest version of MongoDB by running:

Code Listing 8: Install MongoDB package

Or, alternatively, install a specific version of MongoDB (in our case, version 3.4.10).

Code Listing 9: Installing a specific version of MongoDB

5. Make sure the file /lib/systemd/system/mongod.service is present and that it contains the following content:

Code Listing 10: MongoDB configuration file content

6. At this point, we can start MongoDB and test that it works correctly.

Code Listing 11: Starting the MongoDB

Let’s check to see if it’s possible to connect to the database:

Code Listing 12: Starting the client via terminal

This command should successfully connect to the “test” database.

What comes with the MongoDB installation?

We have just seen how to install MongoDB, together with the database itself. There are also a few extra components that are part of the installation package. In this chapter, we are going to go through the list and explain briefly what each of them does.

Figure 9: MongoDB installed utilities.

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with some of the concepts (such as GridFS) that we haven’t touched yet—we’ll be looking into those in the next chapters.

Table 2: MongoDB installation files