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Create a User

On this page

  • MongoDB Atlas Limitations
  • Prerequisites
  • Procedure
  • Configure Database Users for MongoDB Atlas
  • Open the Add New Database User dialog.
  • Select Password.
  • Enter user information.
  • Assign privileges.
  • Optional: Specify the resources in the project that the user can access.
  • Optional: Save as temporary user.
  • Click Add User.
  • Configure Users for Self-Hosted Deployments
  • Connect and authenticate
  • Create additional users for your deployment
  • Connect to the instance and authenticate as myTester
  • Insert a document as myTester
  • Additional Examples
  • Username/Password Authentication
  • Kerberos Authentication
  • LDAP Authentication
  • x.509 Client Certificate Authentication
  • Next Steps

With access control enabled, users are required to identify themselves. You have to grant a user one or more roles. A role grants a user privileges to perform certain actions on MongoDB resources.

Each application and user of a MongoDB system should map to a distinct user. This principle of access isolation facilitates access revocation and ongoing user maintenance. To ensure a system of least privilege, only grant the minimal set of privileges required to a user.

The user information on this page applies to deployments hosted in all of the following environments unless specified otherwise:

  • MongoDB Atlas: The fully managed service for MongoDB deployments in the cloud

The following limitations apply only to deployments hosted in MongoDB Atlas. If any of these limits present a problem for your organization, contact Atlas support.

To be able to create users, you need to:

For routine user creation, you must possess the following permissions:

The userAdmin and userAdminAnyDatabase built-in roles provide createUser and grantRole actions on their respective resources.

To create users for MongoDB Atlas, you must have Organization Owner or Project Owner access to MongoDB Atlas. These roles are unique to MongoDB Atlas and are separate from database users. To learn more, see Atlas User Roles.

Note

The following procedures use SCRAM authentication. For additional information on other authentication mechanisms, see Additional Examples.

A MongoDB Atlas project can have users with different authentication methods.

You cannot change a user's authentication method after creating that user. To use an alternative authentication method, you must create a new user.

Configure database users for your MongoDB Atlas deployment who use SCRAM authentication:

To configure database users for your self-hosted MongoDB Enterprise or MongoDB Community deployment, follow these steps:

1

Using mongosh, connect to your primary mongod or, in a sharded cluster, connect to your mongos and authenticate as a user administrator or a user with the required privileges:

2

Note

The following step uses SCRAM authentication. For additional information on other authentication mechanisms, see Additional Examples.

After authenticating as the user administrator, use the db.createUser() method to create additional users. You can assign any built-in roles or user-defined roles to the users.

The following operation adds a user myTester to the test database who has the readWrite role in the test database as well as the read role in the reporting database.

use test
db.createUser(
{
user: "myTester",
pwd: passwordPrompt(), // or cleartext password
roles: [ { role: "readWrite", db: "test" },
{ role: "read", db: "reporting" } ]
}
)

Tip

The passwordPrompt() method prompts you to enter the password. You can also specify your password directly as a string. We recommend to use the passwordPrompt() method to avoid the password being visible on your screen and potentially leaking the password to your shell history.

The database where you create the user (in this example, test) is that user's authentication database. Although the user authenticates to this database, the user can have roles in other databases. The user's authentication database does not limit the user's privileges.

After creating the additional users, exit mongosh.

3

Important

It is not possible to switch between users in the same mongosh session. Authenticating as a different user means the session has the privileges of both authenticated users. To switch between users exit and relaunch mongosh.

After exiting mongosh as myUserAdmin, reconnect as myTester:

4

As the user myTester, you have privileges to perform read and write operations in the test database (as well as perform read operations in the reporting database). Once authenticated as myTester, insert a document into a collection in the test database. For example, you can perform the following insert operation in the test database:

db.foo.insertOne( { x: 1, y: 1 } )

Tip

See also:

The following operation creates a user in the reporting database with the specified name, password, and roles.

Tip

The passwordPrompt() method prompts you to enter the password. You can also specify your password directly as a string. We recommend to use the passwordPrompt() method to avoid the password being visible on your screen and potentially leaking the password to your shell history.

use reporting
db.createUser(
{
user: "reportsUser",
pwd: passwordPrompt(), // or cleartext password
roles: [
{ role: "read", db: "reporting" },
{ role: "read", db: "products" },
{ role: "read", db: "sales" },
{ role: "readWrite", db: "accounts" }
]
}
)

Users that authenticate to MongoDB using an external authentication mechanism, such as Kerberos, must be created in the $external database, which allows mongos or mongod to consult an external source for authentication.

To use Client Sessions and Causal Consistency Guarantees with $external authentication users (Kerberos, LDAP, or x.509 users), usernames cannot be greater than 10k bytes.

For Kerberos authentication, you must add the Kerberos principal as the username. You do not need to specify a password.

The following operation adds the Kerberos principal reportingapp@EXAMPLE.NET with read-only access to the records database:

use $external
db.createUser(
{
user: "reportingapp@EXAMPLE.NET",
roles: [
{ role: "read", db: "records" }
]
}
)

Tip

See also:

For more information about setting up Kerberos authentication for your MongoDB deployment, see the following tutorials:

Users that authenticate to MongoDB using an external authentication mechanism, such as LDAP, must be created in the $external database, which allows mongos or mongod to consult an external source for authentication.

To use Client Sessions and Causal Consistency Guarantees with $external authentication users (Kerberos, LDAP, or x.509 users), usernames cannot be greater than 10k bytes.

For LDAP authentication, you must specify a username. You do not need to specify the password, as that is handled by the LDAP service.

The following operation adds the reporting user with read-only access to the records database:

use $external
db.createUser(
{
user: "reporting",
roles: [
{ role: "read", db: "records" }
]
}
)

Tip

See also:

For more information about setting up LDAP authentication for your MongoDB deployment, see the following tutorials:

To learn more about setting up LDAP authentication for MongoDB Atlas, see Add Database Users in the MongoDB Atlas documentation.

Users that authenticate to MongoDB using an external authentication mechanism, such as x.509 Client Certificate Authentication, must be created in the $external database, which allows mongos or mongod to consult an external source for authentication.

To use Client Sessions and Causal Consistency Guarantees with $external authentication users (Kerberos, LDAP, or x.509 users), usernames cannot be greater than 10k bytes.

For x.509 Client Certificate authentication, you must add the value of the subject from the client certificate as a MongoDB user. Each unique x.509 client certificate corresponds to a single MongoDB user. You do not need to specify a password.

The following operation adds the client certificate subject CN=myName,OU=myOrgUnit,O=myOrg,L=myLocality,ST=myState,C=myCountry user with read-only access to the records database.

use $external
db.createUser(
{
user: "CN=myName,OU=myOrgUnit,O=myOrg,L=myLocality,ST=myState,C=myCountry",
roles: [
{ role: "read", db: "records" }
]
}
)

Tip

See also:

For more information about setting up x.509 Client Certificate authentication for your MongoDB deployment, see the following tutorials:

To learn more about setting up x.509 Client Certificate authentication for MongoDB Atlas, see Add Database Users in the MongoDB Atlas documentation.

To manage users, assign roles, and create custom roles for your self-hosted MongoDB Enterprise or MongoDB Community deployment, see Manage Users and Roles.

You can also manage users, assign roles, and create custom roles for your MongoDB Atlas deployment.

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