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Emmy Steven
Emmy Steven

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How not to configure MongoDB on Docker

Just as Thomas Edison made 999 attempts in inventing the the lightbulb and then said He discovered 999 ways a lightbulb could not be made. This post is about how I discovered how not to configure MongoDB on Docker.

I was working on my portfolio website, and I decided to use MongoDB on docker to just test out my knowledge on Docker since I have used PostgreSQL on Docker and it worked without any hassle.

this is the content of my initial docker-compose.yml file

version: '3.7'

services:
  mongo:
    image: "mongo:4.0.4"
    container_name: "mongo"
    env_file:
      - .env
    environment:
      - MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_USERNAME:${USER}
      - MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_PASSWORD:${PASS}
      - MONGO_INITDB_DATABASE:${DB}
    volumes:
      - ./db/:/data/db/
    ports:
      - "27017:27017"
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Then I fired up my terminal into the directory where my docker-compose.yml file was saved and did this:

docker-compose up -d

I waited for it to pull the mongo image and then build and start MongoDB as a service.

Then I did the following to see if I could connect,

docker exec -it mongodb bash
mongo -u admin -p

I enter the password on the password prompt, lo and behold I was denied access, for about 8 hours I battle with this issue, I went to stackoverflow, github and other website seeking for solution and I didn't find any.

Then I decided to do what I normally do when I install mongodb on my local machine. In order to do that, I stopped the containers on my terminal and ran this command:

docker-compose stop && docker-compose down

Then I edited my configuration to this:

version: '3.7'

services:
  mongo:
    image: "mongo:4.0.4"
    container_name: "mongo"
    volumes:
      - ./db/:/data/db/
    ports:
      - "27017:27017"
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I ran the following commands on my terminal:

docker-compose up -d
docker exec -it mongodb bash
mongo

and then, I was greeted with an interactive shell for mongodb and then I ran the following commands

use admin

db.createUser(

 {

 user: 'admin',

 pwd: 'yourpassword',

 roles: [{ role: 'userAdminAnyDatabase', db: 'admin' }, 'readWriteAnyDatabase']

 }

)
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followed by this other command too

use your_db_name

db.createUser(

 {

 user: 'your_username',

 pwd: 'your_password',

 roles: [{ role: 'readWrite', db: 'your_db_name' }]

 }

)
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viola! that's what solved the problem I was encountering.

Please drop a comment if you've encountered this kind of problem, and tell us what you did that solved it, and also drop a comment if this post has been helpful in one way or the other.

Cheers!

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