MongoDB is an open source document database with built-in support for the JSON format. It provides a full index support, based on any of the available attributes in a document. It is ideal for high-availability scenarios due to its scalability features. MongoDB, available at https://mms.mongodb.com, is cloud-ready with its management services, MongoDB Management Services (MMS). They utilize and automate most development operations that need to be carried out to keep your cloud database in good shape, taking care of upgrades, further scaling, backups, recovery, performance, and security alerts.

Let's move forward and install MongoDB. Installers for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Solaris are available at http://www.mongodb.org/downloads. Linux users can find MongoDB in all popular distribution repositories, while Windows users can make use of a user-friendly wizard which will guide you through the installation steps, where, for a typical installation, all you need to do is accept the license agreement and provide an installation path.

After a successful installation, execute the following command to start MongoDB. If you want to specify a custom location for your data, you have to use the --dbpath argument. Optionally, you can start the MongoDB HTTP console via the --rest argument:

mongod --dbpath ./data --rest

The default port for communicating with MongoDB is 27017, and its HTTP console is implicitly configured to use a port higher than the data port by a value of 1,000. Therefore, the default port of the console will be 28017. The HTTP console provides useful information about the database, such as logs, health status, available databases, and so on. I strongly advise you to spend some time with it. The console can also be used as a RESTful health check service of the database, because it provides JSON-encoded information about the running database services and the last error that occurred:

GET /replSetGetStatus?text=1 HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:28017
Connection: Keep-Alive
User-Agent: RestClient-Tool
    
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Length: 56
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
    
{
"ok": 0,
"errmsg": "not running with --replSet"
}

This REST interface can be used in a script or an application to automate altering notifications providing the current state of the database engine and so on.

The log section of the console shows that your server is running successfully (if it is). Now we are ready to move further and see how to connect Node.js to MongoDB.