Installing MongoDB and Robomongo for Windows

If you're on Windows, this is the installation section for you. If you're on Linux or macOS, the previous section was for you; you can skip this one. Our goal here is to install MongoDB on our machines, which will let us create a local MongoDB database server. We'll be able to connect to that server with Node.js, and we'll be able to read and write data to the database. This will be fantastic for the Todo API, which will be responsible for reading and writing various Todo-related information.

To get started, we'll grab the MongoDB installer by going over to mongodb.com. Here we can click on the big green Download button; also, we can see several options on this page:

We'll use Community Server and for Windows. If you go to the Version drop down, none of the versions there will look right for you. The top one is what we want: Windows Server 08 R2 64-bit and later with SSL support. Let's start to download this. It is slightly big; just a tad over 100 MB, so it will take a moment for the download to begin.

I'll start it up. It's one of those basic installers, where you click on Next a few times and you agree to a license agreement. Click on the Custom option for a second, although we will be following through with the Complete option. When you click on Custom, it will show you where on your machine it's going to be installed, and this is important. Here, you can see that for me it's on C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Server, then in the 3.2 directory:

This is going to be important because we'll need to navigate into this directory in order to start up the MongoDB server. I will go back though, and I will be using the Complete option, which installs everything we need. Now we can actually start the installation process. Usually, you have to click on Yes, verifying that you want to install the software. I'll go ahead and do that, and then we are done.

Now once it's installed, we'll navigate into Command Prompt and boot up a server. The first thing we need to do is to navigate into that Program Files directory. I'm in Command Prompt. I recommend that you use Command Prompt and not Git Bash. Git Bash will not work for starting up the MongoDB server. I'll navigate to the root of my machine using cd/, and then we can start navigating to that path using the following command:

cd Program Files/MongoDB/Server/3.2

This is the directory where MongoDB was installed. I can use dir to print out the contents of this directory, and what we care about here is the bin directory:

We can navigate into bin using cd bin, and print its contents out using dir. Also, this directory contains a whole bunch of executables that we'll use to do things such as starting up our server and connecting to it:

The first executable we'll run is this mongod.exe file. This will start our local MongoDB database. Before we can go ahead and run this EXE, there is one more thing we need to do. Over in the generic File Explorer, we need to create a directory where all of our data can be stored. To do this, I'll put mine in my user directory by going to the C:/Users/Andrew directory. I'll make a new folder, and I'll call this folder mongo-data. Now, the mongo-data directory is where all of our data will actually be stored. This is the path that we need to specify when we run the mongod.exe command; we need to tell Mongo where to store the data.

Over in Command Prompt, we can now start this command. I'll run mongod.exe, passing in as the dbpath argument, the path to that folder we just created. In my case, it's /Users/Andrew/mongo-data. Now if your username is different, which it obviously is, or you put the folder in a different directory, you'll need to specify the absolute path to the mongo-data folder. Once you have that though, you can start up the server by running the following command:

mongod.exe --dbpath /Users/Andrew/mongo-data

You'll get a long list of output:

The only thing you need to care about is that, at the very bottom, you should see waiting for connections on port 27017. If you see this, then you are good to go. But now that the server is up, let's connect to it and issue some commands to create and read some data.