Tony Pitale

MongoDB in a Deployed Environment

I've been messing around with MongoDB in a Ruby/Rails environment for the past week or so. It's been pretty great. I've tweeted about it, and I'm planning to write more than one blog post about it. While at the same time I'm very wary of the so-called NOSQL movement and getting caught up in it. As such, I'm going to avoid dropping my RDBMS of choice (PostgreSQL) and say I'm actually using it in a mixed environment, with zero trouble at all.

So, what will I talk about here? Two things are most important aside from the actual install of MongoDB (which itself is amazingly simple). The first is Security, and the second is Init.

Security is something that must be specially considered with MongoDB because, by default, it runs without any sort of auth in place. This may be contrary to the normal expectations you might have of a data-store. However, this is just fine for many applications, and turning on auth isn't really going to stop anyone, when the password is already in plaintext in a Rails application. The important security aspect we must consider is the firewall. If you are not running iptables on your server, you're behind already. Either way, be sure to double-check the settings and lock any open stuff down. My personal settings only allow for SSH, HTTP, HTTPS to get in. There already exist many good resources available for setting up iptables. So, I'll be skipping it here.

The other half is setting up an init.d script to run the mongod server at boot time. To start, we'll want to download and position the binary files from MongoDB.org and since I'm on a 64-bit linux (ubuntu) system I went and downloaded this: 64-bit linux download

Shortly after downloading, I untar'd it, and moved /bin the files to a location within a usable path (e.g., /usr/local/mongodb). I checked the permissions to verify that it was executable, but still owned and writable only by root. I finally created symbolic links from /usr/local/mongodb/bin to /usr/local/sbin. In addition I created a logs directory for a pid and a log file within /usr/local/mongodb. Then, I was prep'd to write the init.d.

Since there are many, many init.d scripts on even a barebones server I decided I would crib something from the fine folks on the nginx project who make use of the start-stop-daemon utility. Here is the init.d script that I came up with: MongoDB init script.

It's fairly simple to understand, but the important parts are the $DAEMON and the extra params I provide to start-stop-daemon. "run" is the command that must be passed to start MongoDB, and after that I log to the given $LOGFILE I created earlier. This has the benefit of keeping mongod in the background, and also keeping a desired log.

Hopefully, MongoDB will find itself in the repositories of many popular Linux distributions very soon (especially Debian). This should hopefully include a useful init.d script within the package as is par for the course.

In the near future I'll write a post on my experiences mixing MongoDB and a typical SQL database. Amazingly, there's not much difficulty in doing so. I'll also have a post up with a better introduction to Mongolytics, my new gem for doing base server-side analytics tracking with storage provided by MongoDB.

If you'd like to share your experiences, best MongoDB practices, and any comments/questions, please comment!

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