Using MongoDB on heroku without verifying your account.

Started learning node and have been writing a simple API using express for practice. After configuring some routes I wanted to get the API live and tried heroku for that.

API uses MongoDB via mongoose ORM. On Heroku you can setup a MongoDB database using addons like mongolab etc.

Problem Heroku requires your credit card information for some addons even for sandbox account. Which you don’t want to when using a sandbox account or just learning something just like me.

Solution

The solution in simple words is, set up a mongodb database but not using heroku and use this.

HOW?

As you know all you need to connect to a db is connection string. For mongo you have connection string something like this.

mongodb://<user>:<password>@<hostname>:<port>/<database>

Head over to https://mlab.com/ and register a sandbox account and follow along.

1. Register and verify your account.
2. Select the sandbox plan.
3. Create the database.
4. Create a new db user for this database.
5. In this page under your database name you will see a connection string mentioned with the name MongoDB URI which looks something like this. Yours will be different.
   mongodb://<dbuser>:<dbpassword>@de243578.mlab.com:47178/todoapp
6. Fill in all the details. here. For the following db details the MongoURI would become
   dbuser : gunther
   dbpassword: centralperk
   mongodb://gunther:centralperk@de243578.mlab.com:47178/todoapp
7. Now you have connection string ready to use in your code

But, One last step.

Set this connection string to a Heroku environment variable so your code on heroku knows this connection string. cd into your project directory.

heroku config:set MONGOLAB_URI = "mongodb://gunther:centralperk@de243578.mlab.com:47178/todoapp"

and hit enter and you done to use this in your code. This value you set you can access this using process.env.MONGOLAB_URI

In my instance I am using mongoose to connect to MongoDB so this is how my code looks like for the connection.

const mongoose = require('mongoose')
mongoose.connect(process.env.MONGOLAB_URI || 'mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/TodoApp');

With this in place, you have a mongodb on your heroku application !