Today after messing around with MongoDB for hours. I finally figured out one thing… adding a user with password for a specifc database of MongoDB. :<

So I better write a blog to note this down…

My situation was simple, there is only one single instance. So I don’t need to touch those complex ‘replica set’ stuff.

So, few things to note:

First enable the auth mechanism, if you use the config file, modify it. By default, config lies in /etc/mongod.conf. Uncomment this line,

auth = true

Or you can start mongod with --auth option.

Then use mongo admin to connect to server and switch to the admin database, in where you’ll create the Admin user, and use this admin user to create a user for our db.

If you only want this user to have the minimum privileges to create other user. You can make its role as userAdminAnyDatabase;

However, this role is very limited. So for development convenience, I used root. So the commands are,

mongo admin

db.createUser( {
    user: 'userNameHere',
    pwd: 'passwordHere',
    roles: [
        { role: 'root', db: 'admin'}
    ]
})

If you got db.createUser() is not a function, please check your mongo’s version. This method was not introduced until 2.6. And you can use db.addUser() in previouse versions.

Then switch to the database you want, and create another user with readWrite role.

use yourDB

db.createUser( {
    user: 'userNameHere',
    pwd: 'passwordHere',
    roles: [
        { role: 'readWrite', db: 'yourDB'}
    ]
})

That’s it, by now you can use this user to connect mongo. You can test it by using db.auth('username', 'password')