MongoDB Cookbook - Second Edition

Expiring documents after a fixed interval using the TTL index

One of the interesting features in Mongo is automatically expiring data in the collection after a predetermined amount of time. This is a very useful tool when we want to purge some data older than a particular timeframe. For a relational database, it is not common for folks to set up a batch job that runs every night to perform this operation.

With the TTL feature of Mongo, you need not worry about this as the database takes care of it out of the box. Let's see how we can achieve this.

Getting ready

Let's create data in Mongo that we want to play with using the TTL indexes. We will create a collection called ttlTest for this purpose. We will require a server to be up and running. Refer ...