Working with the MongoDB database

Nowadays, almost every web application stores and retrieves data from a database. One of the most popular databases that works well with Node.js is MongoDB (http://www.mongodb.org/). This is what we are going to use. The main characteristic of MongoDB is that it is a NoSQL database with a different data format and query language.

Installing MongoDB

As with every other popular software, MongoDB is available for all operating systems. If you are a Windows user, there is an installer that you can download from the official page http://www.mongodb.org/downloads. For Linux or OS X developers, MongoDB is reachable through most popular package management systems. We are not going to cover the installation in detail, but you will find nicely written instructions at http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/.

Running MongoDB

After its successful installation, we will have a mongod command available. By running it in the terminal, we start a MongoDB server listening...