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Install MongoDB Community Edition on Debian

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Overview

Use this tutorial to install MongoDB Community Edition from .deb packages on Debian.

Production Notes

Before deploying MongoDB in a production environment, consider the Production Notes document.

Platform Support

MongoDB only provides packages for 64-bit builds of Debian 8 and 9. See Supported Platforms for more information.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) - Unsupported

MongoDB does not support WSL, and users on WSL have encountered various issues installing on WSL. For examples, see:

Packages

Important

The mongodb-org-unstable package is officially maintained and supported by MongoDB Inc. and kept up-to-date with the most recent MongoDB releases. This installation procedure uses the mongodb-org-unstable package.

The mongodb package provided by Debian is not maintained by MongoDB Inc. and conflicts with the mongodb-org-unstable package. To check if Ubuntu’s mongodb package is installed on the system, run sudo apt list --installed | grep mongodb. You can use sudo apt remove mongodb and sudo apt purge mongodb to remove and purge the mongodb package before attempting this procedure.

MongoDB provides officially supported packages in their own repository:

Package Name Description
mongodb-org-unstable A metapackage that will automatically install the four component packages listed below.
mongodb-org-unstable-server Contains the mongod daemon, associated init script, and a configuration file (/etc/mongod.conf). You can use the initialization script to start mongod with the configuration file. For details, see Run MongoDB Community Edition.
mongodb-org-unstable-mongos Contains the mongos daemon.
mongodb-org-unstable-shell Contains the mongo shell.
mongodb-org-unstable-tools Contains the following MongoDB tools: mongoimport bsondump, mongodump, mongoexport, mongofiles, mongorestore, mongostat, and mongotop.

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 4.0.

Using .tgz Tarballs

Note

The recommended procedure to install is through the package manager. However, as an alternative, you can install by downloading the .tgz tarballs directly.

MongoDB .tar.gz tarballs require installing the following dependencies:

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sudo apt-get install libcurl3 openssl

Procedure

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.

For example, from a system shell, you can extract using the tar command:

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tar -zxvf mongodb-linux-*-4.1.5.tgz
3

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.

Run MongoDB Community Edition

Production Notes
Before deploying MongoDB in a production environment, consider the Production Notes document.
ulimit Considerations
Most Unix-like operating systems limit the system resources that a session may use. These limits may negatively impact MongoDB operation. See UNIX ulimit Settings for more information.
Directories

By default, MongoDB instance stores:

  • its data files in /var/lib/mongodb
  • its log files in /var/log/mongodb

If you installed via the package manager, the directories are created during the installation.

If you installed manually by downloading the tarballs, you can create the directories using mkdir -p <directory> or sudo mkdir -p <directory> depending on the user that will run MongoDB. (See your linux man pages for information on mkdir and sudo.)

By default, MongoDB runs using the mongodb user account. If you change the user that runs the MongoDB process, you must also modify the permission to the /var/lib/mongodb and /var/log/mongodb directories to give this user access to these directories.

To specify a different log file directory and data file directory, edit the systemLog.path and storage.dbPath settings in the /etc/mongod.conf. Ensure that the user running MongoDB has access to these directories.

Note

The following instructions assume that you have downloaded the official MongoDB mongodb-org-unstable packages, and not the unofficial mongodb package provided by Debian, and are using the default settings.

1

Start MongoDB.

Issue the following command to start mongod:

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sudo service mongod start
2

Verify that MongoDB has started successfully

Verify that the mongod process has started successfully by checking the contents of the log file at /var/log/mongodb/mongod.log for a line reading

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[initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017

27017 is the default port the standalone mongod listens on.

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

3

Stop MongoDB.

As needed, you can stop the mongod process by issuing the following command:

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sudo service mongod stop
4

Restart MongoDB.

Issue the following command to restart mongod:

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sudo service mongod restart
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.

Uninstall MongoDB Community Edition

To completely remove MongoDB from a system, you must remove the MongoDB applications themselves, the configuration files, and any directories containing data and logs. The following section guides you through the necessary steps.

Warning

This process will completely remove MongoDB, its configuration, and all databases. This process is not reversible, so ensure that all of your configuration and data is backed up before proceeding.

1

Stop MongoDB.

Stop the mongod process by issuing the following command:

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sudo service mongod stop
2

Remove Packages.

Remove any MongoDB packages that you had previously installed.

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sudo apt-get purge mongodb-org-unstable*
3

Remove Data Directories.

Remove MongoDB databases and log files.

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sudo rm -r /var/log/mongodb
sudo rm -r /var/lib/mongodb

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