Installing single node MongoDB

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.

Getting ready

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.

How to do it…

1. 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 the mongod (the mongo server process) process.
2. We will start the server from the console with the data directory, /data/mongo/db, as follows:

   > mongod --dbpath /data/mongo/db
   

How it works…

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.

See also

There are times where we would like to configure some options on server startup. In the Installing single node MongoDB recipe, we will use some more start up options.