Mongo Bongo

An opinionated tool for managing MongoDB databases. It allows you to easily:

• Configure authenticated databases users
• Manage user passwords
• Perform backups and restores
• Rename databases
• Work with replica sets

Note, this tool has been tested to work with [MongoDB 4.x(https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/), macOS with Homebrew, and Ubuntu 18.04.

Users

In an authenticated database, users are stored in the admin database. As far as this tool is concerned, there are two categories of users:

• Administrative Users: root, backup and restore.
• Database Users: admin and user.

root user is only used to manage users across databases. backup and restore are used for backing up and restoring databases respectively.

Within a database admin users are used for things like re-indexing. The user is for everything else, and is the user that the an API process will connect as.

admin Database

To create an admin database and add the root, etc.. users you must first bind Mongo to localhost only and then disable security:

bongo mongo --no-auth --no-bind-all

Now add the admin database users:

bongo users admin

Running the command when the users already exists just confirms their existence. You can change passwords in future by running:

bongo users admin --new-passwords

Now re-enable security (and optionally bind to all IP addresses):

bongo mongo --auth --bind-all

Credentials File

After running bongo users admin you will have a ~/.bongo/credentials.json5 file that contains the users passwords. Having this file makes it easy to find the appropriate passwords to add to your MongoDB URI's when configuring your API services.

NOTE: If this is alarming to you, realize that it is no different from that way the systems like AWS work when they store login credentials in ~/.aws/credentials files. The file has the mode set to allow only the user that creates it to read and modify it. Just make sure that the security for account is good, by using only SSH authentication for example.

Other Databases

To create the approriate users for other databases, with security enabled:

bongo users <db>

And to regenerate passwords run:

bongo users <db> --new-passwords

Backups

To backup a database run:

bongo backup <db>

You'll get a timestamped .tar.gz file in the current directory. Specify --output <dir> to change the output directory. This file only contains non-system collections and is moded to only be accessible to the current user. It's a standard, compressed tar file. You can specify --output to give a different directory for where the file will be placed, but the name will always include the database name and the date/time.

Specify --port to use a non-default mongod instance. Specify --new-name to rename the database when backing it up. This is about as easy and fast as a database rename operation gets in MongoDB.

Restorations

To restore a backup:

bongo restore <archive>

Restores the database, dropping any existing collections with the same. You can set the admin and user users with bongo as above if needed, or just copy over the credentials.json file manually.

You can specify --port for non-default mongod instances, e.g. replica sets.

Other

The tool generates cryptographically strong 16 character alphanumeric passwords that should not give any problems when used on the command line or in MongoDB URI's with passwords, e.g. mongodb://user:zY99Ab8cddf8e01x@localhost:27107/db-name.

The bongo mongo command reads the mongod.conf file as YAML and rewrites it stripping any comments If comments in the .conf file are important to you then please submit a pull request to add that functionality.