Installing from source

The beauty of installing MongoDB directly from its source code is that it ensures that you can run MongoDB on any server, and that you have the absolute latest version. Minimum requirements for source installation include:

• A modern C++ 11 compiler
• Python (https://www.python.org/) 2.7 or above
• pip (https://pypi.org/project/pip/, tool for installing python packages)
• git (https://git-scm.com/, recommended)

In addition, there are OS-specific requirements, which are detailed in this table:

    
Linux           Compiler: GCC 4.8.2 or later

      

          

                   
          
Libraries needed:

          glibc-devel

          libcurl-devel

          openssl-devel

          epel-release

          python-devel
        

      

          

                   
          
Libraries needed:

          build-essential

          libffi-dev

          libssl-dev

          python-dev
        

      
macOSX           Compiler: Clang 3.4 of XCode 5

      
           Libraries: XCode (especially command line tools)

      
Windows           Compiler: Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 or later
  

The source build process does not follow the traditional sequence of configure, make, and make install. Installation is performed using SCons (Software Construction Tool, https://www.scons.org/), which, in turn, uses the programming language Python. Accordingly, after you clone or download the MongoDB source, you will notice many Python scripts and configuration files.

For the purposes of this illustration, we use CentOS 7. To install MongoDB from source, assuming all prerequisites listed previously are met, proceed as follows:

1. Download the source code from github.com. There are two ways to download the MongoDB source code from github.com:
   1. Download directly from this URL:
      https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/archive/master.zip.
      You would then need to unzip it into a folder such as /home/user/mongo.

1. 2.  If you have installed git, you can clone the repository from a command line terminal as follows:

2. Change to the newly created (or cloned) mongo directory.
3. Install pip requirements:

4. Build the source code using SCons:

At this point, you can then follow the same steps listed previously to run MongoDB:

• Create a directory for the database (for example /var/lib/mongo)
• Create a directory for the log (for example /var/log/mongo)
• Create a config file, which indicates the locations of the database and log (for example /etc/mongod.conf)
• Start MongoDB