Explore MongoDB in the Meteor shell

You can access all the application data with the Meteor MongoDB shell.

Open another terminal, cd to the app directory, and start the MongoDB shell.

>> meteor mongo

Show all the databases in MongoDB:

>> show dbs

The default database for the app is named meteor; switch to the meteor database:

>> use meteor

Display all collections in the database:

>>show collections

The show collections command will not return any results.

The reason is that we created a collection on the client side only. This collection exists in Minimongo, and it is in the browser's memory. If we refresh the page, the collection and the data will be gone.

In order to create the same collection and persist data into MongoDB, we have to execute the exact same Time = new Mongo.Collection('time'); on the server. As soon as we do that, both the collections will be in sync and the data will be persisted into the database.

For now, we don't want to save the timer data on the server; we only want to take advantage of the Meteor server to client real-time communication.