MongoDB 3 on Debian Jessie - Sun, May 24, 2015

As of 2015-05-24, the installation documentation for MongoDB on Debian only included Wheezy (7). I found that it pretty much works fine on Jessie (8). But the installation as they had it had a couple problems:

• The mongodb-org-3.0.list file will point to a non-existent repository.
• The configuration file that ships with the Debian package is in the old configuration format, which makes it impossible to specify some of the options I needed.
• If you want to use the new WiredTiger storage engine, the above issue combined with the fact that you’ve probably already started MongoDB makes this tricky.

Install using the repository for wheezy

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver 'keyserver.ubuntu.com' --recv '7F0CEB10'
echo 'deb http://repo.mongodb.org/apt/debian wheezy/mongodb-org/3.0 main' | sudo tee '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-3.0.list'
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mongodb-org

Replace the configuration

The new YAML configuration format is way better than the old format, but the Debian wheezy package ships with the old format. So edit /etc/mongod.conf and replace it with equivalent YAML options. This is what I came up with. The engine: "wiredTiger" part is what prompted me to switch to the new configuration format.

storage:
  dbPath: "/var/lib/mongodb"
  engine: "wiredTiger"
  wiredTiger:
    collectionConfig:
      blockCompressor: snappy

systemLog:
  destination: file
  path: "/var/log/mongodb/mongodb.log"
  logAppend: true
  timeStampFormat: iso8601-utc

net:
  bindIp: "127.0.0.1"
  port: 27017

WiredTiger

Hopefully you’ve specified in the configuration file that you want to use the wiredTiger storage engine before MongoDB starts for the first time. I did not do this. This leaves the /var/lib/mongodb directory full of files compatible only with MMAPv1. The easiest ay to fix this is just to delete all the files in the data directory after stopping MongoDB:

sudo systemctl stop mongod.service
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/mongodb/*

Then add the engine: "wiredTiger" option, as shown above. Restarting should work fine. If you choose to invoke MongoDB without the init script / systemctl (which is useful with debugging), make sure that you use:

sudo -u mongodb mongod [... options]

Otherwise, mongod will create necessary files owned by either root or yourself, depending on whether you used sudo or not, which will lead to tricky issues such as the log (where error messages go!) not being writable by the mongodb user.

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