Using Django and MongoDB to Build a Blog

Mihalis Tsoukalos — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 20:38:13 +0000

This article shows how to create a simple blog site using the MongoDB Document Database and the Django Web framework.

Mongo Basics

MongoDB is an open-source document-oriented database, not a traditional relational database, written in C++ by Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz. Being a document database does not mean storing Microsoft Word documents, but rather it means storing semi-structured data. You can input arbitrary binary JSON objects (BSON) into a MongoDB database. It runs on UNIX machines as well as Windows and supports replication and sharding.

Your Linux distribution probably includes a MongoDB package, so go ahead an install it if you have not done so already. Alternatively, you can download a precompiled binary or get the MongoDB source code from http://www.mongodb.org and compile it yourself.

On a Debian 7 system, you can install MongoDB with the following command:


# apt-get install mongodb

After installing MongoDB, start the MongoDB server process with:


# service mongodb start

Similarly, you can stop the running MongoDB server with:


# service mongodb stop

After installation, type mongo --version in your UNIX shell to find the MongoDB version you are using, and type mongo to enter the MongoDB shell and check whether the MongoDB server process is running.

By default, the MongoDB server process listens to localhost using the 27017 port. You can change it if you want, but if both the MongoDB server and the Django installation are on the same machine, it is more secure to leave it as it is.

The configuration file for MongoDB is /etc/mongodb.conf. Nevertheless, if you want to run multiple MongoDB servers on the same UNIX machine, you can bypass the /etc/mongodb.conf file and utilize command-line options that allow you to use a different port number, a different IP or even a different MongoDB configuration file.

Figure 1. MongoDB Terminology

Figure 1 shows the most useful MongoDB terms in relation to their respective SQL terms.

Starting the MongoDB server process (mongod) on a Linux machine without any parameters and without root privileges should generate output similar to the following:

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