Developer Tools

Mastering the art of MongoDB development can be challenging and requires more than just an understanding of the core concepts and syntax. To truly harness the full potential of MongoDB and its ecosystem, you should familiarize yourself with the array of developer tools that MongoDB offers.

MongoDB has a long history of ensuring that developers have access to the best tools to work with their MongoDB clusters and data. In 2011—only two years after MongoDB 1.0 was released—10gen (now known as MongoDB Inc.) released MongoDB Management Service (MMS), later rebranded as Ops Manager. Ops Manager has played a vital role for developers using MongoDB products as a portal to manage and monitor their systems. The management tool, being part of the MongoDB ecosystem from early releases, reflects the importance of MongoDB, aiming to provide developer tools, along with growing its database system architecture.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

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Technical requirements

For all the developer tools discussed in this chapter, you will need a running MongoDB cluster that you can connect to. This can be done either locally, or by spinning up a free cluster via the managed service—MongoDB Atlas.

• Download MongoDB Community Edition from the official website: https://www.mongodb.com/try/download/community
• Create a free account on MongoDB Atlas (https://www.mongodb.com/try) to use the MongoDB tools

Introduction to developer tools

To facilitate efficient database management and query optimization, MongoDB tools are designed for enhanced productivity, performance monitoring, and seamless integration with developers' preferred development environments. In this section, you will learn about various MongoDB tools and explore their functionalities, use cases, and best practices, all aimed at empowering you to wield the capabilities of MongoDB to their fullest.

Categories of developer tools

Developer tools, officially designed by MongoDB, serve users across different scenarios. Some tools are meant to manage the data you store inside your MongoDB instance, some are plugin tools for third-party software, whereas some tools are used for the management and performance monitoring of the cluster itself. Based on the use case scenario, these tools can be classified as follows:

Based on these categories, the tools could be classified as the following:

Administrative tools

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MongoDB Shell

The MongoDB Shell (mongosh) is a fully functional JavaScript and Node.js-based REPL environment used to interact with MongoDB deployments. mongosh is a powerful and versatile command-line interface that serves as an interpreter. You can use mongosh to talk to the database directly and perform create, read, update, delete (CRUD) operations, administrative operations, aggregations, indexing, and much more on the database.

Installation

You can install mongosh using any of the following methods:

• mongosh is available as a standalone package from the MongoDB Download Center: https://www.mongodb.com/download-center/community/releases.
• Download and install mongosh by following the steps provided in the MongoDB documentation: https://www.mongodb.com/docs/mongodb-shell/install/#std-label-mdb-shell-install.
• You can use Node Package Manager (npm), as it's built on Node.js:
  1. Open the terminal
  2. Run the following command to install mongosh globally on your system...

MongoDB CLI

The MongoDB CLI is a modern command-line interface tool that enables you to manage your MongoDB services from the terminal. It is used to deploy and manage MongoDB clusters in Atlas, Cloud Manager, and Ops Manager.

Installation

You can install MongoDB CLI from the official website: https://www.mongodb.com/try/download/mongocli.

Once installed, you can use it to interact with your cloud deployments and manage clusters remotely for Atlas, Cloud Manager, and Ops Manager deployments through its user-friendly command-line interface.

Configuration

Follow these steps to configure and authenticate MongoDB CLI to your cluster:

1. Create API keys: In the Atlas UI, create an API key to programmatically access your organization or project.
2. Create a project: If you don't have an existing project, create one to group clusters that share users, settings, or environments.
3. Establish a connection: Add your IP or CIDR block to the API access list for your...

MongoDB Compass

MongoDB Compass is a powerful and intuitive GUI tool designed to simplify database management, query building, and data visualization for MongoDB. It offers a user-friendly alternative to the command-line interface by providing a visual representation of MongoDB data and collections.

Compass is a free interactive tool. With Compass, you can explore databases and collections, view and analyze the data, and perform CRUD operations without writing complex queries manually. Compass provides visualizations for most queries and index performance, allowing database administrators to monitor and troubleshoot clusters seamlessly through a TLS-encrypted connection. It exposes an API that can be used to import or develop plugins. Compass also has the ability to download a read-only edition so that you can limit access to non-destructive operations. There is also an isolated edition of this tool that can be used to restrict connections to a single chosen server.

Installation...

MongoDB for VS Code

MongoDB provides an extension for VS Code that lets you work with your data directly within the coding environment. By using the MongoDB for VS Code extension, you can take advantage of the powerful features and extensibility of VS Code while seamlessly working with MongoDB databases.

Installation

Setting up the MongoDB for VS Code extension follows the generic installation method used for any other extension installed on VS Code or similar IDE tools. To install the extension, follow the steps given below:

1. Download and install the Visual Studio Code installer from https://code.visualstudio.com/.
2. Open the Extensions view by clicking on the Extensions icon in the Activity bar.
3. Alternatively, you can open the Extensions view by pressing Ctrl + Shift + X or Cmd + Shift + X. Search for MongoDB for VS Code in the extension marketplace.
4. Click Install on the MongoDB for VS Code extension.
5. Once the installation is complete, the Install button...

Summary

In this chapter, you explored different MongoDB developer tools and learned how to use them to increase your productivity. The chapter introduced MongoDB Shell—mongosh, the command-line interface serving as a direct gateway to MongoDB databases. After that, you learned about MongoDB CLI, which is a command-line interface to connect to cloud-based MongoDB Atlas clusters.

Then, you explored the powerful GUI tool MongoDB Compass, which provides an intuitive and visual representation of data. Finally, you had a look at the MongoDB for VS Code extension. This extension offers you a seamless experience, combining powers of a code editor with the capabilities of MongoDB development. Throughout the chapter, the significance of each tool was highlighted along with their functionalities, use cases, and best practices.

In Chapter 4, Connecting to MongoDB, you will explore the multi-language facets of MongoDB. The chapter will guide you through direct driver methods, ODM libraries...