Offer MongoURL guidance in options

[jphastings]

I struggled to get my MongoDB configuration working (I kept being told it wasn't configured when it clearly was!)

I saw elsewhere that IndieKit expects MongoDB URIs to have a path element (to define the database name), I added /indiekit to my URI and things started working.

Assuming I've correctly understood the problem and a suitable fix, I thought I'd update guidance in the docs!

There may be ways to set this as a default if it's unspecified, but I'm not familiar enough with the codebase to offer a fix yet. Feel free to replace this PR with a code-based one instead!

[paulrobertlloyd]

Thanks for this info. I’m still figuring out MongoDB, and have come across needing/not needing a database in the connection URL before.

I saw elsewhere that IndieKit expects MongoDB URIs to have a path element (to define the database name)

Where did you see this, is it Indiekit’s docs, or somewhere else in the codebase?

Also, what platform are you running Indiekit on, it might be a platform specific requirement, a case of database names being inferred in some places, and not others.

Will dig into this a bit more to ensure any updates to the docs are correct before merging, but thanks for the PR and reporting this sticking point!

[paulrobertlloyd]

Researching this a bit further, I’ve found some older documentation which says:

/database is the name of the database to login to and thus is only relevant if the username:password@ syntax is used. If not specified the “admin” database will be used by default.

However, no newer documentation says this, and all guides and tutorials don’t mention it. Here is contemporary documentation on the connection string format: v4.4, v6.3 current.

Indiekit specifies which database to use when it starts up, too:

indiekit/packages/indiekit/index.js

Line 66 in 6e6cfa2

const database = this.client.db("indiekit");

So, with all that said, I think the current documentation is correct.

If you let me know which service you are hosting your Indiekit server on, and what version of MongoDB you have installed, I can work out if any platform-specific guidance is needed.

[paulrobertlloyd]

With #695, Indiekit will now notify users more prominently about connection issues. It will also use any database name given in the connection string (else use the default, test).

This is a breaking change that will ship in the next beta release, and I’ve added a note to the documentation highlighting this change.

[paulrobertlloyd]

I wonder if this situation occurred due to the way connection strings are handled.

Without username and password in the connection string:

mongodb://<host>:<port>/<database>

With a username and password in the connection string

mongodb://<username>:<password>/<database>?authSource=<defaultauthdb>

If username and password are provided, but the authSource option isn’t, it assumes that the value for is the authentication database (which it invariably isn’t):

mongodb://<username>:<password>/<defaultauthdb>

God, this is confusing!