Lift Cookbook

Chapter 8. MongoDB Persistence with Record

This chapter gives recipes for making use of MongoDB in your Lift application. Many of the code examples in this chapter can be found at https://github.com/LiftCookbook/cookbook_mongo.

Connecting to a MongoDB Database

Problem

You want to connect to a MongoDB database.

Solution

Add the Lift MongoDB dependencies to your build and configure a connection using net.liftweb.mongodb and com.mongodb.

In build.sbt, add the following to libraryDependencies:

"net.liftweb" %% "lift-mongodb-record" % liftVersion

In Boot.scala, add:

import com.mongodb.{ServerAddress, Mongo}
import net.liftweb.mongodb.{MongoDB,DefaultMongoIdentifier}

val server = new ServerAddress("127.0.0.1", 27017)
MongoDB.defineDb(DefaultMongoIdentifier, new Mongo(server), "mydb")

This will give you a connection to a local MongoDB database called mydb.

Discussion

If your database needs authentication, use MongoDB.defineDbAuth:

MongoDB.defineDbAuth(DefaultMongoIdentifier, new Mongo(server),
  "mydb", "username", "password")

Some cloud services will give you a URL to connect to, such as mongodb://alex.mongohq.com:10050/fglvBskrsdsdsDaGNs1. In this case, the host and the port make up the first part, and the database name is the part after the /.

If you need to turn a URL like this into a connection, you can do so by using java.net.URI to parse the URL and make a connection:

object MongoUrl {

  def defineDb(id: MongoIdentifier, url: String) {

    val uri = new URI(url)

    val db = uri.getPath drop 1
    val server