WebFund 2013W: MongoDB

In this tutorial you will start playing with MongoDB.

Note: MongoDB has its own JavaScript interpreter. Thus, in a web application using Node and MongoDB you'll have three JavaScript interpreters: the one in the browser, the one in Node, and the one in MongoDB. Same language, but access to different resources/objects in each.

Interactive Tutorial

First, for a gentle introduction, try this interactive MongoDB tutorial. It is very simple but will get you familiar with the basics.

Get MongoDB running

To get MongoDB running in Ubuntu, just run apt-get install mongodb.

On Windows, follow the instructions here. (Note: you can't get it to run as a service in the lab.)

For every other operating system, refer to the MongoDB Getting Started guides.

More MongoDB tutorials

Do the regular getting started tutorial in your now up-and-running MongoDB installation.

To keep going, try out other tutorials! But, these are probably more than you need until you have your basic application working.

Node and MongoDB

Recall that we covered a Node app that used MongoDB in the simple blog tutorial. A slightly revised version of the code (more in keeping with current versions of Node) is available here.

Can you now get comments working in the blog example? What did you need to change?

To learn more about how Node and MongoDB interact, see the documentation of the MongoDB driver for Node.

If you want to interact with MongoDB at a higher level in Node, mongoose may be of interest.