How to Restore a MongoDB Database from Compass

Essays and updates on product, engineering, and AI by Chase Adams.

1 minute read

I often find that I want to restore a MongoDB database locally from MongoDB (Preview database) Atlas to determine if I've made any breaking changes.

Restoring your MongoDB database

Download a backup from MongoDB Atlas.
Unzip the backup. In this case, I unzipped it to my Downloads directory as dump.
run a Docker container with the following flags:
- -p <TO>:<FROM> - To is the port that you are serving on your local machine and From is the container's process port for Mongo (unless specified otherwise, it's 27017)
- -v <LOCAL DB DIRECTORY>:<DOCKER DB PATH> - Local DB Directory is where I unzipped the backup. Docker DB Path is the directory Mongo will use to serve a database. Unless specified otherwise, this is /data/db
```
docker container run -p 27018:27017 -v $HOME/Downloads/dump:/data/db mongo:5.0.7
```

Accessing your MongoDB database

Now from Mongo Compass you should be able to connect to your locally running Mongo instance with this connection string:

mongodb://@localhost:27018?authSource=admin&readPreference=primary&directConnection=true&ssl=false

Notice the 27018? In this case, because that's the port I designated for Mongo to serve from on my computer, this is the port I want to connect to.

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Restoring your MongoDB database

Download a backup from MongoDB Atlas.

Unzip the backup. In this case, I unzipped it to my Downloads directory as dump.

run a Docker container with the following flags:

-p <TO>:<FROM> - To is the port that you are serving on your local machine and From is the container's process port for Mongo (unless specified otherwise, it's 27017)
-v <LOCAL DB DIRECTORY>:<DOCKER DB PATH> - Local DB Directory is where I unzipped the backup. Docker DB Path is the directory Mongo will use to serve a database. Unless specified otherwise, this is /data/db
```
docker container run -p 27018:27017 -v $HOME/Downloads/dump:/data/db mongo:5.0.7
```

Accessing your MongoDB database

Now from Mongo Compass you should be able to connect to your locally running Mongo instance with this connection string:

mongodb://@localhost:27018?authSource=admin&readPreference=primary&directConnection=true&ssl=false

Notice the 27018? In this case, because that's the port I designated for Mongo to serve from on my computer, this is the port I want to connect to.