In this recipe, we will look at installing MongoDB in the standalone mode. This is the simplest and quickest way to start a MongoDB server, but it is seldom used for production use cases. However, this is the most common way to start the server for development purposes. In this recipe, we will start the server without looking at a lot of other startup options.
Well, assuming that we have downloaded the MongoDB binaries from the download site, extracted it, and have the resulting bin directory in the operating system's path variable. (This is not mandatory, but it really becomes convenient after doing so.) The binaries can be downloaded from http://www.mongodb.org/downloads after selecting your host operating system.
- Create the directory,
/data/mongo/db(or any of your choice). This will be our database directory, and it needs to have permission to write to it by themongod(the mongo server process) process. - We will start the server from the console with the data directory,
/data/mongo/db, as follows:> mongod --dbpath /data/mongo/db
If you see the following line on the console, you have successfully started the server:
[initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017
Starting a server can't get easier than this. Despite the simplicity in starting the server, there are a lot of configuration options that can be used to tune the behavior of the server on startup. Most of the default options are sensible and need not be changed. With the default values, the server should be listening to port 27017 for new connections, and the logs will be printed out to the standard output.