MongoDB.app: The easiest way to get started with MongoDB on the Mac

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A few days ago I released my first ever “real” swift app. The app is called MongoDB.app and it’s just a thin wrapper around the official MongoDB binaries that you can download from their site. The app will add a status menu icon which will allow you to start and stop a local MongoDB server visually. All data saved by the server will be stored to ~/Documents/MongoData.

The idea was to create the simplest possible experience for MongoDB beginners. My inspiration was the great Postgres.app which does an amazing job at running PostgreSQL for your mac development environment.

Currently the app is using the latest stable release of mongo which at this moment is v2.6.7. I plan to keep the app up to date so expect frequent updates which for now I will post on the GitHub repo until I figure out how to do automated updates using the Sparkle framework. I might use some help doing this. The app will check for updates at startup and allow one-click download and update using Sparkle framework.

Inside the actual application package you will be able to find all the standard binaries that ship with mongodb including:

  • bsondump
  • mongo
  • mongod
  • mongodump
  • mongoexport
  • mongofiles
  • mongoimport
  • mongooplog
  • mongoperf
  • mongorestore
  • mongos
  • mongosniff
  • mongostat
  • mongotop

If you want to have access to all of these from your terminal you should add the application’s vendor folder to your path by adding the following to ~/.bash_profile.

# Add MongoDB.app to path
PATH="/Applications/MongoDB.app/Contents/Resources/Vendor/mongodb:$PATH"

Download

To get the latest release go to the repo’s releases page. Please let me know if you find this useful.