Setting up a replica set

In this section, we will go through the most common deployment procedures to set up a replica set.

Converting a standalone server to a replica set

To convert a standalone server to a replica set, we first need to cleanly shut down the mongo server:

> use admin
> db.shutdownServer()

Then we start the server with the --replSet configuration option via the command line or using a configuration file, as explained in the next section.

First, we connect via the mongo shell to the new replica set enabled instance as follows:

> rs.initiate()

Now, we have the first server of our replica set. We can add the other servers (which must have also been started with --replSet) by using the mongo shell as follows...