other errors I have searched on have been the following - mostly pulled from running as root in the terminal and getting lots of traces:

what I find really interesting is that after uninstalling and reinstalling it worked first try after being launched from BREW. if the issue was ipv6 based it should not have been able to resolve the ‘localhost’ in my connection string.

the error with the .plist makes me think that after running once mongodb wrote some config stuff and it is now jammed up and won’t accept connections going forward from that point.

to be clear I can connect via MONGOSH and can see the db’s and collections in the shell. it is just this page using mongoose that is failing - MongooseServerSelectionError: connect ECONNREFUSED ::1:27017