MongoDB is a weird little database but seems really popular and works nicely with low overhead Javascript applications.
This article highlights a few key pointers when working with MongoDB
Difference mongodb-org versus mongodb packages
Be careful when installing MongoDB! There is an official version, called MongoDB-ORG and another one, which isn’t maintained by MongoDB-ORG. If you install the one with your Ubuntu package manager, you might end up with the wrong version. If you then install the proper one from MongoDB-ORG, you might not get it working.
For me this was a clue:
sudo apt-get install -y mongodb-org The following packages have unmet dependencies: mongodb-org : Depends: mongodb-org-database but it is not going to be installed
When I changed to Focal’s packages it was too late. Constant Core Dumps. Eventually I figured out I have the wrong version but nothing I did, including reading a ton of Stack articles about apt purge mongo* and permissions, couldn’t fix version 5 for me. Thankfully I found a way of installing 4.x and this worked.
Inserting Data
Here is a simple example from a Laravel MongoDB tutorial:
db.users.insertOne({
"title":"First Blog Post",
"body" :"Lorem Ipsum, etc.",
"slug" :"first-blog-post"
})Here is another more complex example from the MongoDB website:
db.users.insertOne({
name: { first: 'Alan', last: 'Turing' },
birth: new Date('Jun 23, 1912'),
death: new Date('Jun 07, 1954'),
contribs: [ 'Turing machine', 'Turing test', 'Turingery' ],
views : Long(1250000)
})
Retrieving Data
Mongo has a few tools to query but it appears there is one called ‘mongo’. Lol.
Here is a quick transcript how we retrieved some data (bold indicates commands):
> show databases
admin 0.000GB
config 0.000GB
local 0.000GB
myappdb 0.000GB
tyntec 0.000GB
whatsapp 0.000GB
> use tyntec
switched to db tyntec
> show tables
channels
contacts
> db.contacts.find()
{ "_id" : ObjectId("xxx"), "phone" : "yyy", "name" : "Vander Host", "thread_ts" : "no thread assigned", "__v" : 0 }
> Duplicate key error index
As a newbie this will be one of your first pains. You can’t insert data if the key is specific as unique.
Here’s an example. It’s a Tyntec contacts model, but the system failed because the thread is reset and then it becomes null, which can be a duplicate index. So we had to comment it out:
const ContactSchema = new mongoose.Schema({
phone: {
type:String,
required:true,
unique:true,
},
name: {
type:String,
},
thread_ts: {
type:String,
// unique: true,
},
});
Using with Laravel
One gotcha with Laravel, is you are extending a new ‘Model’, see below:
namespace App\Models;
use Jenssegers\Mongodb\Eloquent\Model;
class Post extends Model
{
protected $connection = 'mongodb';
}
Passwordless Connection Info
If you don’t have authenticated MongoDB, this is your DSN:
'dsn' => env('DB_URI', 'mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017')