Configuring and Using Authentication with MongoDB

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ashley Willis.

Configuring

• Create a key file for multiple mongod processes to auth against each other, making sure it is owned by and only readable by the mongod process:

    touch mongodb-keyfile
    chmod 600 mongodb-keyfile
    openssl rand -base64 741 > mongodb-keyfile
    # copy to desired location and change owner
  

• Add the following to /etc/mongod.conf:

    auth=true
    keyFile=/etc/mongodb-keyfile
  

• Restart mongod

• Create needed users

Connecting with the MongoDB shell

After connecting with the mongo shell, you can authenticate against the authentication database via:

use admin
db.auth(user, password)

You can also also pass mongo the following options and the shell will prompt for the password. --authenticationDatabase is only needed if the authentication database is different from the database you want to use.

mongo -u $USER -p --authenticationDatabase $AUTH_DB $HOST/$DATABASE

Connecting with the MongoDB perl driver

• In perl, connect with the following (db_name is the optional authentication database and defaults to admin):

    my $mongo = MongoDB->connect($host, {username => $username, password => $password, db_name => $auth_database});