MongoDB Shell is a Command Line Interface (CLI) application which manages the NoSQL, in particularly, MongoDB.

You can write and execute Javascript in MongoDB Shell.

1) Installation

1. Please download MongoDB Enterprise Server from the MongoDB Download Center
2. Extract the downloaded file to your User folder, for example, "/usr/local/bin/mongodb"
3. Set the path variable to the "bin" folder inside mongodb folder, for example, "/usr/local/mongodb/bin"
   • This step let Windows CMD tool or Apple Terminal to invoke the program without the need of specifying the program's exact location.
4. Open CMD or Terminal, input mongo --nodb
   • If it shows MongoDB shell version v4.2.1 > , then you are successful.

2) Connect to a sample database

Open Shell, and type

mongo "mongodb+srv://{cluster address}" --username {username}

You replace the cluster address and username by your defined ones.

Example: mongo "mongodb+srv://learning-5jamo.mongodb.net/test" --username admin

Note

While connecting to your MongoDB Atlas cluster, or any MongoDB server, from the mongo shell, you may see the following warning message:

... WARNING: shell and server versions do not match

This warning message can be safely dismissed for the purposes of this course. The purpose of this message is to let you know that the version of the server/cluster that you are connecting to has a different version then the one of your client mongo shell. Given the different versions between server and client, there might be some incompatibility commands/features not supported by either the client shell or the server. However, in this course, you will not encounter any such issue.

If you encounter below error while connecting to an atlas cluster, please exit the Mongo shell (if you are in one) by typing quit(). You need to run the command from your command-line interface.

2019-01-11T13:35:53.633-0500 E QUERY [js] SyntaxError: missing ; before statement @(shell):1:6

3) Testing the connection

These are some basic queries to control your database.

show databases to show all databases in this cluster

use {database name} to use this database

show collections to show all collections in this database

db.{collection name}.find().pretty() to list all documents in this collection

For more queries, read MongoDB Query Language