Quick Getting Started MongoDB Commands

New to MongoDB

I recently needed to interact with a Mongo Database for the first time and I found myself trying to remember these shell commands quite often so I’ve documented them here for future reference.

Getting started with the shell. To connect a terminal to the currently running mongo db:

$ mongo --port <port-number>

In my case, that was 3001. If you don’t know what the port number is, you can run this command on a system terminal:

$ sudo lsof -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN | grep mongo

Found from StackOverflow.

Then to list all the databases to knew which one to connect to:

$ show dbs

To use one that’s listed to run commands against

$ use <database-name>

To find out the collections, run:

$ show collections

To count how many,

$ db.<collection-name>.count()

Further reading:

Full docs docs.mongodb.com/manual/mongo/.

The CLI quick reference is also really handy docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/mongo-shell/