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 we provide increases. We have a nice and clean alternative to providing the startup options from a configuration file rather than as command-line arguments.
If you have already seen and executed the steps mentioned in the Single node installation of MongoDB recipe, you need not do anything different, and 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 write permissions. Let's take a look at the steps in detail:
- Create a
configfile that can have any arbitrary name. In our case, let's say we create the file at/conf/mongo.conf. We will then edit the file and add the following lines of code to it:port = 27000 dbpath = /data/mongo/db logpath = /logs/mongo.log smallfiles = true
- Start the Mongo server using the following command:
> mongod --config /conf/mongo.conf
All the command-line options we discussed in the previous recipe, Starting a single node instance using command-line options, hold true. We are just providing these options in a configuration file instead. If you have not visited the previous recipe, I recommend that you do so, as this is where we have discussed some of the common command-line options. The properties are specified as <property name> = <value>. For all those properties that don't have values, for example, the smallfiles option, the value given is a Boolean value, true. If you need to have a verbose output, you will add v=true (or multiple v's to make it more verbose) to our config file. If you already know what the command-line option is, it is pretty easy to guess the value of the property in the file. It is the similar to the command-line option, with just the hyphen removed.