Install MongoDB Community on macOS using .tgz Tarball
On this page
Note
MongoDB Atlas
MongoDB Atlas is a hosted MongoDB service option in the cloud which requires no installation overhead and offers a free tier to get started.
Overview
Use this tutorial to manually install MongoDB 6.0 Community
Edition on macOS using a downloaded .tgz tarball.
MongoDB Version
This tutorial installs MongoDB 6.0 Community Edition. To install a different version of MongoDB Community, use the version drop-down menu in the upper-left corner of this page to select the documentation for that version.
Installation Method
While MongoDB can be installed manually via a downloaded .tgz
tarball as described in this document, it is recommended to use the
brew package manager on your system to install MongoDB if
possible. Using a package manager automatically installs all needed
dependencies, provides an example mongod.conf file to get you
started, and simplifies future upgrade and maintenance tasks.
➤ See Install MongoDB using the brew Package Manager for instructions.
Considerations
MongoDB Shell, mongosh
When you use the .tgz package to install the server, you need to
follow the mongosh installation instructions to
download and install mongosh separately.
Platform Support
Note
EOL Notice
MongoDB 5.0 Community Edition removes support for macOS 10.13
MongoDB 6.0 Community Edition supports macOS 10.14 or later.
See Platform Support for more information.
Production Notes
Before deploying MongoDB in a production environment, consider the Production Notes for Self-Managed Deployments document which offers performance considerations and configuration recommendations for production MongoDB deployments.
Install MongoDB Community Edition
To manually install MongoDB Community Edition from the .tgz, select the tab
that corresponds with your Mac's processor and complete the following steps:
Ensure the binaries are in a directory listed in your PATH environment variable.
The MongoDB binaries are in the bin/ directory of the tarball. You can
either:
Copy the binaries into a directory listed in your
PATHvariable, such as/usr/local/bin(Update/path/to/the/mongodb-directory/with your installation directory as appropriate)sudo cp /path/to/the/mongodb-directory/bin/* /usr/local/bin/ Create symbolic links to the binaries from a directory listed in your
PATHvariable, such as/usr/local/bin(Update/path/to/the/mongodb-directory/with your installation directory as appropriate):sudo ln -s /path/to/the/mongodb-directory/bin/* /usr/local/bin/
Ensure the binaries are in a directory listed in your PATH environment variable.
The MongoDB binaries are in the bin/ directory of the tarball. You can
either:
Copy the binaries into a directory listed in your
PATHvariable, such as/usr/local/bin(Update/path/to/the/mongodb-directory/with your installation directory as appropriate)sudo cp /path/to/the/mongodb-directory/bin/* /usr/local/bin/ Create symbolic links to the binaries from a directory listed in your
PATHvariable, such as/usr/local/bin(Update/path/to/the/mongodb-directory/with your installation directory as appropriate):sudo ln -s /path/to/the/mongodb-directory/bin/* /usr/local/bin/
Run MongoDB Community Edition
- ulimit Considerations
- Most Unix-like operating systems limit the system resources that a
process may use. These limits may negatively impact MongoDB operation,
and should be adjusted. See UNIX
ulimitSettings for Self-Managed Deployments for the recommended settings for your platform.Note
If theulimitvalue for number of open files is under64000, MongoDB generates a startup warning.
Procedure
Follow these steps to run MongoDB Community Edition. These instructions assume that you are using the default settings.
Create the data directory.
Before you start MongoDB for the first time, you must create the
directory to which the mongod process will write data.
For example, to create the ~/data/db directory:
sudo mkdir -p ~/data/db
Set permissions for the data and log directories.
Ensure that the user account running mongod has read
and write permissions for these two directories. If you are running
mongod as your own user account, and you just created
the two directories above, they should already be accessible to your
user. Otherwise, you can use chown to set ownership,
substituting the appropriate user:
sudo chown <user> ~/data/db sudo chown <user> ~/data/log/mongodb
Run MongoDB.
To run MongoDB, run the mongod process at the system
prompt, providing the two parameters dbpath and logpath
from above, and the fork parameter to run mongod
in the background. Alternatively, you may choose to store the values
for dbpath, logpath, fork, and many other parameters in a
configuration file.
Run mongod with command-line parameters
Run the mongod process at the system prompt,
providing the three necessary parameters directly on the
command-line:
mongod --dbpath ~/data/db --logpath ~/data/log/mongodb/mongo.log --fork
Run mongod with a configuration file
Run the mongod process at the system prompt,
providing the path to a
configuration file
with the config parameter:
mongod --config /usr/local/etc/mongod.conf
macOS may prevent mongod from running after installation. If
you receive a security error when starting mongod
indicating that the developer could not be identified or verified,
do the following to grant mongod access to run:
Open System Preferences
Select the Security and Privacy pane.
Under the General tab, click the button to the right of the message about
mongod, labelled either Open Anyway or Allow Anyway depending on your version of macOS.
Begin using MongoDB.
Start a mongosh session on the same host machine as the
mongod. You can run mongosh
without any command-line options to connect to a
mongod that is running on your localhost with the
default port of 27017:
mongosh
For more information on connecting using mongosh,
such as to connect to a mongod instance running
on a different host and/or port, see the
mongosh documentation.
To help you start using MongoDB, MongoDB provides Getting Started Guides in various driver editions. See Getting Started with MongoDB for the available editions.
Additional Information
Localhost Binding by Default
By default, MongoDB launches with bindIp set to
127.0.0.1, which binds to the localhost network interface. This
means that the mongod can only accept connections from
clients that are running on the same machine. Remote clients will not be
able to connect to the mongod, and the mongod will
not be able to initialize a replica set unless this value is set
to a valid network interface which is accessible from the remote clients.
This value can be configured either:
Warning
Before binding to a non-localhost (e.g. publicly accessible) IP address, ensure you have secured your cluster from unauthorized access. For a complete list of security recommendations, see Security Checklist for Self-Managed Deployments. At minimum, consider enabling authentication and hardening network infrastructure.
For more information on configuring bindIp, see
IP Binding in Self-Managed Deployments.