I need help connecting to mlab.com database and importing data

1

I’ve tried both methods suggested in setup docs applying it to my mongo.connect function and connection is failing

To connect using the mongo shell:
mongo ds113849.mlab.com:13849/mydb -u <dbuser> -p <dbpassword>
To connect using a driver via the standard MongoDB URI (what's this?):

mongodb://<dbuser>:<dbpassword>@ds113849.mlab.com:13849/mydb
2

What’s the exact code you’re using?

3

node src/connect.js

const mongo = require('mongodb').MongoClient
function doConnect() {
 	var url = 'mongodb://<username>:<password>@ds113849.mlab.com:13849/mydb'
	mongo.connect(url, (err, db) => {
		if(err) { 
			throw err
		} else {
			console.log('Successfully connected to MongoDB')
		}
	})
}
doConnect()
4

<username> and <password> are supposed to be replaced with the actual username and password (URI encoded if necessary).

Edit: Note that they should not be hard coded, but instead stored in environment variables in the .env file.

Example:
.env file:

USERNAME=harrypotter
PASSWORD=avadakedavra

Your code:

const url = `mongodb://${process.env.USERNAME}:${process.env.PASSWORD}@ds113849.mlab.com:13849/mydb`;
5

I did that for security reasons. I am well aware how to replace placeholders in code.

6

What exactly is happening? You’re getting an error? Is anything displaying in the console?

7

Trying to use Mongoose instead as recommended by a back end dev to get around the problem running
npm install mongoose and running connect.js again with node
:

//  connect.js
const mongoose = require('mongoose')
process.env.MONGODB == mongodb://<username>:<password>@ds113849.mlab.com:13849/mydb
mongoose.connect(process.env.MONGODB);
mongoose.connection.on('error', function () {
  console.log('MongoDB Connection Error. Please make sure that MongoDB is running.');
  process.exit(1);
});
9

What happens when you use Mongoose? Same problem?

Did you make sure that you setup a user for that particular database you are using? Check under the users tab and make sure you have a user listed and you are using the username and password assigned to it.

10

Thanks for your reply. I had created a user yes before using Mongoose to connect. I was successful when I tried a code example on a blog post titled Mongoose Connection best practice under the heading Managing the Mongoose connection. That’s all very well but I still need to figure out how to import JSON objects representing social media posts and metadata into a collection.

11

Good news! I figured out to use mlab tools to import/export a collection from adding documents into a collection I named feed to match my app.

Import collection

mongoimport -h ds113849.mlab.com:13849 -d mydb -c feed -u <user> -p <password> --file <input file>

Export collection

mongoexport -h ds113849.mlab.com:13849 -d mydb -c feed -u <user> -p <password> -o feed.json

You get a set of objects dumped into the file but without an array to map() over:


```{"_id":{"$oid":"5aaba1f5734d1d1b8288625d"},"user":"Michael Bay","likes":0,"avatar":"male.svg","action":"replied","images":[],"photosAmount":0,"profile":"","comments":"cool","when":"1519568559"}```