Running mongod service in the background – MAC OS

June 26, 2019

MongoDB ships with an easy mongod CLI command to start its server. For Linux users, there is an added level of flexibility using the Systemd service to manage foreground and background processes. To start a MongoDB server on the boot of a Linux machine, it is as easy as registering a service with systemd using:

$ systemctl enable mongod.service

Switching from a Linux machine to Mac, and after the successful installation of MongoDB, surely, there is a need to start the command in the background while the development process continues.

To this, there are --fork, --quiet, and --syslog. Which are command line parameters for the mongod command.

To further ease the use of this our new discovery, we can create an alias in our .bashrc file by appending this command at the end of the file:

$ echo 'start-mongo = sudo mongod --fork --syslog --quiet' >> ~/.bashrc

Now, at the start of our Mac machine, we can do start-mongo to launch our mongod service.

Easy enough! 🍧