How to create and modify admin users in Mongo DB

Today’s post is related to some repetitive administrative tasks related to database administration like the setup of a user and grant some permissions on Mongo db. I will perform all activities on the Javascript shell for Mongo.

First of all, it’s important to know whether mongo server is running or not. In windows, you may run it as a service. But in this case, I’ll run it in foreground:

C:\Users\JoseEnriqueP>mongod --dbpath .
2015-05-06T23:05:03.205+0200
2015-05-06T23:05:03.222+0200 warning: 32-bit servers don't have journaling enabled by default. Please use --journal if you want durability.</pre> 

Connect to mongo in the usual way and start it up:

C:\Users\JoseEnriqueP>mongo
MongoDB shell version: 2.6.5
connecting to: test

Change to use the administration database and create an administration user.

In this link you will see how to create an admin user in Mongo DB and also how to manage roles and user profiles in mongo.

>use admin;
switched to db admin
 db.createUser(
   {
    user: "admin",
    pwd: "yourPasswordHere",
    roles:
    [
    {
        role: "dbOwner",
        db: "admin"
    }
    ]
   }
 )

Note that the user is now the owner of that db. You will get a confirmation that the user was created successfully:

Successfully added user: {
        "user" : "admin",
        "roles" : [
                {
                        "role" : "dbOwner",
                        "db" : "admin"
                }
        ]
}

In this link you have a complete reference for all users related operations that can be done on Mongo DB.

To change the password of a given user in Mongo DB you need an administrative user. After that, you log into the database and change the password in the following way:

>db.changeUserPassword('user','newpassword');

You won’t get any notification that the password was changed, but try to log with the new password and you should get a ‘1’:

>db.auth('admin','newpass');
1