Configure Your Database Connection

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Overview

Connection Configuration
Manually Configure Database Settings
Automatically Configure Database Settings
Additional Information

Overview

In this guide, you can learn how to configure your Django project's connection to MongoDB.

Connection Configuration

After installing Django MongoDB Backend and creating a project, you can configure your connection to MongoDB in the following ways:

Manually Configure Database Settings by specifying the DATABASES variable in your project's settings.
Automatically Configure Database Settings by using the parse_uri() function.

Tip

To learn how to install Django MongoDB Backend and create a Django project, visit the Get Started with Django MongoDB Backend tutorial.

Manually Configure Database Settings

To manually configure your connection to MongoDB, update the DATABASES variable in your project's settings.py file. Set the DATABASES variable to a dictionary value containing the default key, as shown in the following example:

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        # Specify nested dictionary keys here
    },
}

To configure the default key, assign a nested dictionary as its value. This nested dictionary has the following keys:

Key	Description
ENGINE	The backend driver to use for the connection. Set this key to `"django_mongodb_backend"`.
HOST	Your connection URI. For localhost connections, this key is optional. For SRV connections, you must include a scheme prefix (`mongodb+srv://`). To specify more than one host, include all hostnames in one string. Use a comma to separate each hostname. Example: `"HOST": "mongodb://mongos0.example.com:27017,mongos1.example.com:27017"`
NAME	The database you want to use.
USER	The username for authenticating to the database, if your connection requires authentication.
PASSWORD	The password for your database user, if your connection requires authentication.
PORT	The port number on which the database server is listening. The default port is `27017`. For MongoDB Atlas connections, this key is optional.
OPTIONS	A dictionary of additional connection options for the database. This key is optional. To see a full list of connection options that you can set in the `OPTIONS` key, see the optional parameters for MongoClient in the PyMongo API documentation.

Example

In this example, the DATABASES variable performs the following actions:

Sets the database to my_database
Provides authentication information for a database user whose username is my_user and password is my_password
Specifies the default MongoDB port (27017)
Sets the retryWrites connection option to true, which configures the driver to automatically retry certain write operations if they fail
Sets the w connection option to majority, which configures the driver to wait for acknowledgement from a majority of replica set members before performing write operations

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        "ENGINE": "django_mongodb_backend",
        "HOST": "mongodb+srv://cluster0.example.mongodb.net",
        "NAME": "my_database",
        "USER": "my_user",
        "PASSWORD": "my_password",
        "PORT": 27017,
        "OPTIONS": {
            "retryWrites": "true",
            "w": "majority",
        },
    },
}

Automatically Configure Database Settings

To automatically construct the DATABASES setting that configures your MongoDB connection, you can use the parse_uri() function. This function accepts the following arguments:

uri: Your MongoDB connection URI.
conn_max_age: Configures persistent database connections. This argument is optional. To learn more, see Persistent connections in the Django documentation.
test: Provides a dictionary of settings for test databases. This argument is optional. To learn more, see the TEST setting in the Django documentation.

Example

The following example uses the parse_uri() function to specify the same connection configuration as the previous manual configuration example:

import django_mongodb_backend
MONGODB_URI = "mongodb+srv://my_user:my_password@cluster0.example.mongodb.net/my_database?retryWrites=true&w=majority"
DATABASES["default"] = django_mongodb_backend.parse_uri(MONGODB_URI)

Additional Information

To view a sample project that configures a MongoDB database connection, see the Configure your MongoDB Connection step in the Getting Started tutorial.

To learn more about Django settings, see Settings in the Django documentation.

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