I like command prompts, and CLIs at times, perhaps you too like them. But most of the time, I love to visualize stuff. For example, how do mongodb databases, collections and documents look visually? What if we can have a quicker simple way to visually work and manage our mongodb.
MSSQl is to SQL Server Management Studio as MySQL is to phpmyadmin (if I am not wrong :)), what about mongodb..?
deProjectWelcome Robomongo, which is a shell-centric cross-platform MongoDB management tool. You can download and install Robomongo from their website here, select your platform, download and basically go through the installation steps easily.
Some of the features highlighted from the websites include:
- Robomongo embeds or rather uses the same JavaScript engine that powers mongodb’s v2.2 shell, hence you can reuse your existing skills.
- You can open as many shells as you need pointing to a single mongoDB database or many shells for many different databases.
- Your code is executed statement by statement way.
- You get autocompletion for all objects including functions well known by JavaScript runtime, including autocompletion for databases, collections and even your document.
Once you are finished installing, ensure your mongodb instance is running. Follow the steps here to start mongod shell, once you are done take note of the port (default is 27017).
Then double robomongo to open it, and you will see the following screen:
From the screen, you can see there is no connection, and so click on “create” link on the small child windows, and this presents you with the following screen.
Provide a preferred name for your connection, in my case I gave it ‘Connection One’. Ensure that the address points to the server where your mongod instance is running and also the port is correct. In my case, I am using local instance running on port 27017.
You can test the connection by clicking the ‘Test’ button, which should tell you if the connection succeeded or not. In my case, I got a success like below:
For now, I don’t have authorization to my mongodb, just click ‘close’, and then “save”, make sure your screen at this point is similar to this one:
You can see our connection is listed. At this point, select “Connection One” and click on the “Connect” button. If you have done everything right, then your screen should look like:
Voila! Here is your visual representation of your mongod instance, databases, collections, functions, documents etc. In my case, I expanded to see how documents are represented as below:
So now you know! If you want to explore robomongo, just right click on any level node on the tree, and see what you can achieve. But I can assure you can create, update, list and delete documents. You can also create a database here, add table functions which are just but JavaScript functions. There will be more advanced posts to come and so keep watching!!
Again, happy coding nerdizzles :D !!
