configuring-mongoctl.md

Configuring mongoctl

The main configuration file for mongoctl is ~/.mongoctl/mongoctl.config. This configuration file allows you to control all of the configurable aspects of mongoctl's behavior.

Below is the default configuration generated via the installation:

{
   "mongoDBInstallationsDirectory": "~/mongodb",

   "fileRepository": {
      "servers": "servers.config", // servers file name
      "clusters": "clusters.config" // clusters file name
    },

/**
   "databaseRepository": {
     "databaseURI": "mongodb://localhost:27017", 
     "servers": "servers", // servers collection name
     "clusters": "clusters" // clusters collection name
   },
 **/

   "generateKeyFile": true
}

Configuration options

The mongoctl.config config file supports the following:

• mongoDBInstallationsDirectory: Directory where mongoctl will manage MongoDB installations. mongoctl install will download MongoDB installations to this directory.
• fileRepository : If not null, this object tells mongoctl where to look for configuration files defining servers and clusters. These can be defined as local filesystem paths, 'file:', or 'http:' URLs.
• databaseRepository : If not null, this configures mongoctl with a database endpoint for finding server and cluster configurations
• generateKeyFile : Whether mongoctl should generate a keyfile for the replica set or not. Defaults to true if not set.

_id resolution

When _ids designating servers or clusters are passed to mongoctl commands they are first resolved against the configurations defined in the fileRepository (if configured), and if not found then looked-up in the databaseRepository.

This presents a few basic strategies for managing your server and cluster configurations:

• Keep your configurations in files (which can be version controlled and distributed to db host machines)
• Serve your files from a web server, potentially fronting a version control system such as Github
• Keep your configurations in a central MongoDB configuration database that is accessible by all database hosts

Using a fileRepository

To define your configurations via flat files, create one file to hold all server definitions and another to hold all cluster definitions. By default, servers are defined in ~/.mongoctl/servers.config and clusters in ~/.mongoctl/clusters.config. Each file should contain an JSON array of objects. If you wish to place these files somewhere else simply configure the fileRepository property in mongoctl.config appropriately. These files can reside on the local filesystem of each database host machine or they can be served by a web server and specified via 'http:' URLs in mongoctl.config.

Using a databaseRepository

You may also store your configurations in a MongoDB database. This is a conventient way of sharing configurations amongst disperate machines. When storting configurations in a database, we suggest you have a good document editor to make editing server and cluster objects easy, or maintaining the data as files and importing them into the configuration database using mongoimport.