Question

I’m sort of new at MongoDB and running into a few problems with locating/accessing data that I’ve created or imported, in that it’s ending up in two distinct locations.

If I start the shell like this

 $ mongo

and then show the databases

$ show dbs

this gives me a list of about 10 databases that I’ve created. These are in the /data/db directory It does not include a db called ‘pact’

However, if I connect like this

$ mongo localhost/pact

and then do

 $show dbs

it only lists one db, the pact db, which isn’t listed when I connect to mongo the other way by just doing ‘mongo.’ ‘Pact’ isn’t in the /data/db directory. According to my notes, I might have made the ‘pact’ db by starting mongod this way,

mongod --dbpath data

which I would think would position it in the data/db directory, and I imported into the pact directory like this

mongoimport --stopOnError --db pact --collection products <  products.json

Moving on, if I use mongo in irb and start like this

>> mongo_client = MongoClient.new("localhost", 27017)

and then do ‘show dbs’

I get the long list of dbs from the /data/db directory (which didn’t include pact).

In order to find db pact through irb, I tried to include it after localhost, as I do with mongo localhost/pact

>> mongo_client = MongoClient.new("localhost/pact", 27017)

but I got an error.

1 Is there a way I can find out what directory the ‘pact’ db is in?

2 How can I access it in irb with the Mongo driver if not by

mongo_client = MongoClient.new(“localhost/pact”, 27017)

which I assumed would work since I can do this in the shell mongo localhost/pact

3 Based on what I’ve told you, can you explain why this happened (I’m assuming it’s not the proper way to have data saved in another directory)

Answer 1

My suggestion is to use mongodump in mongo localhost/pact shell context

mongodump -d pact -o /out/dir

to backup the entire database. And use mongorestore at normall mongo shell context

mongorestore -d pact /out/dir

to restore the database.