Question

How can I dump an entire MongoDB database as text (plain text, json, or CSV)?

I’m using an application I’m not too familiar with. I’d like to

• clear the database
• load seed data
• dump the whole db as text
• do some stuff
• dump again

then diff the two!

Answer 1

You can use mongoexport utility. It will dump out json by default but you can specify to dump out csv format.

mongoexport --help will give you all the options you will need.

You mentioned that you would like to dump all the collections from a database, and mongoexport expects you to specify a database and collection name, since it expects to dump one collection.

You can write a short shell script (if you are on Windows, convert to batch script) to the effect of:

#!/bin/sh
# assuming mongo bin is in your path

host=YOURMONGOHOST
port=YOURMONGOPORT
db=DBYOUWANTTOEXPORT

for c in `mongo --quiet $host:$port/$db --eval 'db.getCollectionNames()' | sed 's/,/ /g'`
do
    mongoexport --host $host --port $port -d $db -c $c > $c.json
done