This tutorial outlines the basic installation process for installing MongoDB on Debian systems, using .deb packages as the basis of the installation. MongoDB releases are available as .deb packages for easy installation and management for users of Debian. While some Debian distributions include their own MongoDB packages, the official packages are generally more up to date.
This tutorial includes: an overview of the available packages, instructions for configuring the package manager, the process for installing packages from the MongoDB downloads repository, and preliminary MongoDB configuration and operation.
Note
This tutorial applies to both Debian systems and versions of Ubuntu Linux prior to 9.10 “Karmic” which do not use Upstart. Other Ubuntu users will want to follow the Install MongoDB on Ubuntu tutorial.
See
Additional installation tutorials:
The downloads repository provides the mongodb-10gen package, which contains the latest stable release. Additionally you can install previous releases of MongoDB.
You cannot install this package concurrently with the mongodb, mongodb-server, or mongodb-clients packages that your release of Debian may include.
The Debian package management tool (i.e. dpkg and apt) ensure package consistency and authenticity by requiring that distributors sign packages with GPG keys. Issue the following command to import the MongoDB public GPG Key:
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 7F0CEB10
Create a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list file using the following command.
echo 'deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/debian-sysvinit dist 10gen' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list
Now issue the following command to reload your repository:
sudo apt-get update
Issue the following command to install the latest stable version of MongoDB:
sudo apt-get install mongodb-10gen
When this command completes, you have successfully installed MongoDB!
You can use the mongodb-10gen package to install previous versions of MongoDB. To install a specific release, append the version number to the package name, as in the following example:
apt-get install mongodb-10gen=2.2.3
This will install the 2.2.3 release of MongoDB. You can specify any available version of MongoDB; however apt-get will upgrade the mongodb-10gen package when a newer version becomes available. Use the following pinning procedure to prevent unintended upgrades.
To pin a package, issue the following command at the system prompt to pin the version of MongoDB at the currently installed version:
echo "mongodb-10gen hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections
These packages configure MongoDB using the /etc/mongodb.conf file in conjunction with the control script. You can find the control script at /etc/init.d/mongodb.
This MongoDB instance will store its data files in the /var/lib/mongodb and its log files in /var/log/mongodb, and run using the mongodb user account.
Note
If you change the user that runs the MongoDB process, you will need to modify the access control rights to the /var/lib/mongodb and /var/log/mongodb directories.
Among the tools included with the MongoDB package, is the mongo shell. You can connect to your MongoDB instance by issuing the following command at the system prompt:
mongo
This will connect to the database running on the localhost interface by default. At the mongo prompt, issue the following two commands to insert a record in the “test” collection of the (default) “test” database.
db.test.save( { a: 1 } )
db.test.find()
See also
“mongo” and “mongo Shell Methods“