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Install MongoDB Community Edition on macOS

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Overview

Use this tutorial to install MongoDB Community Edition on macOS systems.

Platform Support

  • MongoDB 4.0 may lose data during unclean shutdowns on macOS 10.13+.

    For details, see WT-4018.

  • MongoDB only supports macOS versions 10.11 and later on Intel x86-64. See Supported Platforms for more information.

You may download MongoDB Community Edition through either the MongoDB Download Center or the popular macOS package manager Homebrew.

Note

Starting with MongoDB 3.6, MongoDB binaries, mongod and mongos, bind to localhost by default. From MongoDB versions 2.6 to 3.4, only the binaries from the official MongoDB RPM (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora Linux, and derivatives) and DEB (Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives) packages would bind to localhost by default. To learn more about this change, see Localhost Binding Compatibility Changes.

Install MongoDB Community Edition

Note

To install a different version of MongoDB, please refer to that version’s documentation. To install the previous version, see the tutorial for version 3.6.

Note

You can also spin up MongoDB on AWS, Azure, or GCP using Atlas, our fully-managed database-as-a-service. Atlas enables you to configure anything from a free sandbox environment to a globally sharded production cluster. Set up a free cluster now.

Install MongoDB Community Edition Manually

1

Download the MongoDB .tar.gz tarball.

Download the tarball for your system from the MongoDB Download Center.

2

Extract the files from the downloaded archive.

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tar -zxvf mongodb-osx-ssl-x86_64-4.0.3.tgz
4

Ensure the binaries are in a directory listed in your PATH environment variable.

The MongoDB binaries are in the bin/ directory of the tarball. You must either:

  • Copy these binaries into a directory listed in your PATH variable such as /usr/local/bin,
  • Create symbolic links to each of these binaries from a directory listed in your PATH variable, or
  • Modify your user’s PATH environment variable to include this directory.

For example, you can add the following line to your shell’s initialization script (e.g. ~/.bashrc):

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export PATH=<mongodb-install-directory>/bin:$PATH

Replace <mongodb-install-directory> with the path to the extracted MongoDB archive.

Install MongoDB Community Edition with Homebrew

Homebrew installs binary packages based on published “formulae.” This section describes how to update brew to the latest packages and install MongoDB Community Edition. Homebrew requires some initial setup and configuration, which is beyond the scope of this document.

1

Update Homebrew’s package database.

In a system shell, issue the following command:

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brew update
2

Install MongoDB.

You can install MongoDB via brew with several different options. Use one of the following operations:

Install the MongoDB Binaries

To install the MongoDB binaries, issue the following command in a system shell:

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brew install mongodb
Install the Latest Development Release of MongoDB

To install the latest development release for use in testing and development, issue the following command in a system shell:

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brew install mongodb --devel

Run MongoDB

1

Create the data directory.

Before you start MongoDB for the first time, create the directory to which the mongod process will write data. By default, the mongod process uses the /data/db directory. If you create a directory other than this one, you must specify that directory in the dbpath option when starting the mongod process later in this procedure.

The following example command creates the default /data/db directory:

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mkdir -p /data/db
2

Set permissions for the data directory.

Before running mongod for the first time, ensure that the user account running mongod has read and write permissions for the directory.

3

Run MongoDB.

To run MongoDB, run the mongod process at the system prompt. If necessary, specify the path of the mongod or the data directory. See the following examples.

Run without specifying paths

If your system PATH variable includes the location of the mongod binary and if you use the default data directory (i.e., /data/db), simply enter mongod at the system prompt:

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mongod

Specify the path of the mongod

If your PATH does not include the location of the mongod binary, enter the full path to the mongod binary at the system prompt:

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<path to binary>/mongod

Specify the path of the data directory

If you do not use the default data directory (i.e., /data/db), specify the path to the data directory using the --dbpath option:

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mongod --dbpath <path to data directory>
4

Verify that MongoDB has started successfully.

Verify that MongoDB has started successfully by checking the process output for the following line:

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[initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017

The output should be visible in the terminal or shell window.

You may see non-critical warnings in the process output. As long as you see the log line shown above, you can safely ignore these warnings during your initial evaluation of MongoDB.

5

Begin using MongoDB.

Start a mongo shell on the same host machine as the mongod. You can run the mongo shell without any command-line options to connect to a mongod that is running on your localhost with default port 27017:

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mongo

For more information on connecting using the mongo shell, such as to connect to a mongod instance running on a different host and/or port, see The mongo Shell.

To help you start using MongoDB, MongoDB provides Getting Started Guides in various driver editions. See Getting Started for the available editions.

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