As I ventured into Lesson 4 in Udacity’s Data Wrangling with MongoDB, I really wanted to run the first script — inserting a record into the database — locally. I feel like I really damaged the sanctity of my files by installing, uninstalling, messing with permission, etc. for hours in all different locations in my computer. When I finally installed MongoDB, pymongo, and ran the script successfully… it seemed almost easy. So I wanted to share how I did it step by step. Note that I am on Mac OSX v 10.9.5.
First install pymongo. Open a terminal window and type pip install pymongo. I’m using Anacondas Python Distribution which comes with pip. This was the easiest part 
On to installing MongoDB…
1. Download MongoDB file from here, unzip the folder, and move to your directory of choice. I simply put it in my home directory Users/frankCorrigan
2. Open terminal and cd into mongo and then into bin
cd mongodb-osx-x86_64-3.0.4/bin/
3. Make data directory to where data will be written
mkdir -p /data/db
Note: You may run into some permission issues. Best thing to do is check out StackOverflow.
4. At this point in the terminal I’m still in this directory
Users/frankCorrigan/mongodb-osx-x86_64-3.0.4/bin
and I want to run this mongod command like this
./mongod
5. If the last line says
waiting for connections on port 27017
then open a new terminal and type the command
./mongo
6. Open yet another terminal window and run the python script
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | def add_city(db): db.cities.insert({"name" : "Chicago"})def get_city(db): return db.cities.find_one()def get_db(): from pymongo import MongoClient client = MongoClient('localhost:27017') db = client.examples return dbif __name__ == "__main__": db = get_db() add_city(db) print get_city(db) |
After a second or two, this line should appear…
{u'_id': ObjectId('55998b5ffa699010f0937a98'), u'name': u'Chicago'}
And you are good! Remember to gracefully shutdown the server… go back to the window where you ran the ‘./mongo’ command and type ‘quit()’ and then go to the window where you ran the ‘./mongod’ command and type ‘control-c’.
This works for sure, but if I’m making ‘bad practice’ errors.. I’d love to hear it.