Getting started with MongoDB¶

MongoDB is a popular document store that makes it super simple store, retrieve, and analyze JSON-based datasets. It is often used as a transactional store for web applications. Although it’s not strictly a “big data” tool, it is an important element in many applications.

To get started, let’s define our stack in a file (let’s call it mongo.yaml). The file should look something like this:

backend:
   - storage:
        personality: "mongodb"
        instances: 1
connectors:
   - personality: "ferry/mongodb-client"

Although MongoDB does support sharding for scalability, Ferry currently does not support this (as of version 0.2.2). Consequently, you probably want just a single instance of MongoDB.

Running an example¶

Once you have the application defined, go ahead and start it. Once it’s started login to your client to see what environment variables have been populated by MongoDB.

$ env | grep BACKEND
BACKEND_STORAGE_TYPE=mongodb
BACKEND_STORAGE_MONGO=10.1.0.1
BACKEND_STORAGE_MONGO_PASS=eec68b55-9819-4461-bb55-f1494cfe364e
BACKEND_STORAGE_MONGO_USER=9b845bdf-657c-4402-ac45-c08a3c91e3d8

Note that MongoDB by default generates a random username and password for authentication. You’ll need to pass those values into your client before accessing MongoDB.

More resources¶

As mentioned, MongoDB is often used in combination with another data store that’s more focused on analytics, such as Hadoop or GlusterFS. Here’s where to learn how to create a multi-storage application. Also, here are a few links for additional MongoDB documentation.

MongoDB