Express and MongoDB

Piyush Garg

Published in

Daily Programmer

5 min readApr 25, 2020

Hey there, In this article, I would be teaching you how to use MongoDB with express.js and perform CRUD operations.

What is MongoDB?

MongoDB is a no-SQL database. It is a general-purpose, document-based, distributed database built for modern application developers and for the cloud era.

MongoDB stores the data as form of document inside collections.

For Example: If I have a record of 5 students, So I can say that I have 5 documents inside a collection named as students.

I hope you got the point. 😄

Note: In this tutorial, I will be using MongoDB atlas to avoid the complexities faced while installing MongoDB and it would also be easier for beginners to understand too.
MongoDB Atlas is a cloud service to use mongoDb.

Let’s Begin

Step 0: Create an account on MongoDB

Head over to https://www.mongodb.com/ and create your free account to use MongoDB atlas.

After creating your account, choose free cluster and click on create a cluster

Now, wait for 2–3 minutes for the cluster to get deployed.

Congrats! You have successfully deployed your cluster and now we are ready to move on to next step. 🎉

Step1: Configuring MongoDB Atlas

There are a couple of tweaks here and there which we need to follow to get started with MongoDB Atlas.

Creating a user role to access the database from our application

Now, We have to whitelist the IP’s from where we can access the database.

Navigate to Network access and click Add IP Address

Select Allow Access from anywhere and select confirm

Step 2: Project Setup

Now, lets set up our project structure and create boilerplate code.

Firstly, create a folder. Let's name it as “myProject”.

Now, Fire-up your terminal or command prompt and run:

npm init

Great, Now let's install dependencies.

Run:

npm i express mongoose

Great Going, Now let's create some files and folders. For the time bear with me and create these folders. I am going to explain the working of each and file step by step.

Our Project Structure:

myProject
|
|- model
     |- user.js
|- index.js
|- package.json

In the above project structure, we have created a folder model, this is the folder where we are going to keep all our schemas for different collection.

Currently, we have one, the user.js

Step 3: Creating the Boilerplate Code

Head over to index.js and code along with me.

Pretty simple!

Step 4: Connect our node application to MongoDB Atlas

Connecting application to MongoDB is really simple.

Head over to Clusters panel and click connect.

2. Click on connect your application.

3. Copy the connection string

Great Now back to our code …..

Follow the steps below to connect to MongoDB Atlas

Import the mongoose package in index.js

2. Use connect function of mongoose to connect to our application and pass the connection string that we copied earlier.

Replace the original password with <password>

Additionally, pass the following parameters to the connect function:

Refer to https://mongoosejs.com/docs/deprecations.html for more info

{useNewUrlParser: true,useUnifiedTopology: true}

Congrats! 🎉… try running the server and you would see MongoDB connected on the console.

Step 4: Creating user schema

In this step, we would be working with the user.js inside our models folder and create a user schema.

In this file, we, first of all, require the mongoose package and then use the . Schema method to create the schema. In the Schema method, we pass an object specifying our schema of the user with various properties like type, unique and required.

Finally, we create a model using mongoose. model which requires two parameters:

First: The name of the model as a string. [ users ]

Second: The user schema we created above.