As we can see, providing options from the command line does the work, but it starts getting awkward as soon as the number of options that we provide increase. We have a nice and clean alternative to provide the start up options from a configuration file rather than as command-line arguments.
If you have already executed the Installing single node MongoDB recipe, you need not do anything different as all the prerequisites of this recipe are the same.
The /data/mongo/db directory for the database and /logs/ for the logs should be created and present on your filesystem with the appropriate permissions to write to it and perform the following steps:
- Create a configuration file that can have any arbitrary name. In our case, let's say that we create this in
/conf/mongo.conf. We then edit the file and add the following lines to it:port = 27000 dbpath = /data/mongo/db logpath = /logs/mongo.log smallfiles = true
- Start the mongo server using the following command:
> mongod --config /config/mongo.conf
All the command-line options that we discussed in the previous recipe, Starting a single node instance using command-line options, hold true. We are just providing them in a configuration file instead. If you have not visited the previous recipe, I would recommend you to do so as that is where we discussed some of the common command-line options. The properties are specified as <property name> = <value>. For all the properties that don't have values, for example, the smallfiles option, the value given is a Boolean value, true. If we need to have a verbose output, we would add v=true (or multiple v's to make it more verbose) to our configuration file. If you already know what the command-line option is, then it is pretty easy to guess what the value of the property is in the file. It is almost the same as the command-line option with just the hyphen removed.