Backing up MongoDB

Explored in previous posts and videos, MongoDB is a great way to store information without a schema. All of the information is stored in a JSON like format called BSON which essentially are documents, but similar to a SQL Database the data cannot be directly read on the host system. 

I was interested in learning some more about how to backup the files. Turns out that MongoDB provides a dump tool similar to MySQL called mongodump and mongorestore. 

To get started one can run the following command on their host system or container. If you used the MongoDB Docker image, the mongodump command can be run inside the container directly. 

Local Run

mongodump -u=<user> -p=<password> --authenticationDatabase=admin --db=<database to download>

The part '--authenticationDatabase' is important. On the MongoDB container the users allowed to access the database are specified are in that 'admin' database on the Mongo instance, and it must be defined in the mongodump command for the connection to be successful.

Similar to mysqldump, the mongodump command can also be used from a remote host.

Install the MongoDB Command Line Database Tools on the remote host. They offer the tools for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. 

*Note on Fedora 36, using the RedHat/CentOS 8.0 package worked. *

Modify the previous command to the below:

Remote Run

mongodump --host=<Domain/IP> --port=<Mongo service port - default is 27017> -u=<user> -p=<password> --authenticationDatabase=admin --db=<database to download>

Assuming a connection can be made all of the database files and relevant metadata will come down to the directory where the command was run. A successful run will look similar to the below. 

Once complete you will see a directory called 'dump' with the database(s) listed as directories inside. 

To specify the output location on the local system (the system being used to access and backup the MongoDB instance) you may use the '-o' or '--output' flag. 

Remote Run | Specify Download Location

mongodump --host=<Domain/IP> --port=<Mongo service port> -u=<user> -p=<password> --authenticationDatabase=admin --db=<database to download> -o=<directory location>

Restoring data from a Mongodump

The companion utility to mongodump is mongorestore. Mongorestore works similarly to mongodump, but the user specifies the db and the back up files. 

mongorestore --host <Domian/IP:Port> --authenticationDatabase=admin -u <user> -p <password> -d <db to restore> <backup folder location>

One additional tip: 

If the container was installed using the same docker-compose from the PHP and MongoDB tutorial, the port for the MongoDB Instance isn't exposed on the local system. This is good from a security standpoint. The companion web server accesses using the hostname from the private Podman / Docker network. To access the container host from the physical machine you need to use the IP address of the MongoDB container itself.

Using either Docker or Podman, run the inspect command to check to find the Network information. 

sudo podman inspect <container name or ID> | grep "IPAddress" OR
sudo docker inspect <container name or ID> | grep "IPAddress"

Additional information:

Information about using mongodump

Information about using mongorestore

Docker install and basic commands

 

This blog has been a long time coming. I've been quite busy work-wise and hiding from Covid so hard to find quiet time to add these videos. 

Apologies. 

This video is around the setup and basic use of Docker in Linux. Running Docker in Linux is honestly the most ideal case, regardless of whether this a production workload or just for testing / development like on Workstation. 

Key commands we go over:

- run - create and start a new container
- start - start an existing container
- stop  - stop an existing container
- exec - interact with a running container
- rm  - remove an existing and undesired container
- ps - view all running containers
- ps -a - view all existing containers

There are a ton of other commands, but based on what I do to initialize some packaged solutions or existing LAMP stack these tools are fine for managing Docker. 

To get more information about how to use Docker / Podman commands to create a LAMP stack without docker-compose (previous video), please check out this blog.

I hope this is useful, and feel free to comment. 

*Note* please excuse the typo in bionic at around minute 4:30 or so. Binonic is obviously not right :). 

LAMP stack in Docker

This video goes over setting up a LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) stack in Docker using Docker Compose. 

The video doesn't cover the installation of Docker, but here are the related links. 

Docker MacOS install

Docker Windows install - Windows 10 Pro required

Docker Linux install

Docker-Compose Linux install - Once Docker is setup on Ubuntu just type 'sudo apt install docker-compose'

Generally it's easier to setup the LAMP stack or most stacks for development using Docker since pre-configured images can be pulled from Docker Hub and downloaded quickly without having to know all the packages, and then configuring the packages. That said, our Alpine VM did end up taking up less space, and roughly took the same amount of time to setup - partly my being too talkative, partly just download speed. 

Overall, Docker is a great tool. Its ability to leverage and re-purpose existing images to create new containers, and relative easy install on Windows and MacOS, makes it a go to choice for developers. The mount-bind which we show in the video - ./LAMPcontained:/var/www/html - is amazing as a VM would need the user to upload files using FTP or create another SMB service to share files to in order to upload changes to the VM, whereas Docker can just allow changes from the host to appear in the container using that command. For these reasons, and the relative ease vs setting up a VM environment, Docker is a great choice for developers, and also highly robust in a production / server environment as well. 

I also want to highlight that the original docker-compose.yml file is a modified version I found in the book The Joy of PHP by Alan Forbes which is a great set of example code to get started using PHP and HTML to interact with databases and create interactive websites. I used it to learn PHP and found it very helpful.

docker-compose.yml template

Dockerfile template <- note that the link displays Dockerfile.txt to better show the contents, but Dockerfile should not have a extension. 

One other note with running LinuxMint I've had to manually add the Docker additional repository in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/additional-repositories.list file, so please be mindful of that if you are a LinuxMint user. Poking around forums it seems this can be finicky so if you can't find the Docker packages after apt-add-repository and then apt update, check that file link to make sure it's there and correct to your build of the system. This could happen on any Linux distro it seems, but I ran into on LinuxMint, while I did not on Ubuntu.

Hope this was helpful, more to come. Thank you as always.