A strong contender to Ruby and Rails is Python with Django. Similar to Mongoid there is MongoEngine and an official MongoDB low level driver, PyMongo.

Installing PyMongo can be done using pip or easy_install:

python -m pip install pymongo
python -m easy_install pymongo

Then in our class we can connect to a database:

>>> from pymongo import MongoClient
>>> client = MongoClient()

Connecting to a replica set needs a set of seed servers for the client to find out what the primary, secondary, or arbiter nodes in the set are:

client = pymongo.MongoClient('mongodb://user:passwd@node1:p1,node2:p2/?replicaSet=rsname')

Using the connection string URL we can pass a username/password and replicaSet name all in a single string. Some of the most interesting options for the connection string URL are presented in the next section.

Connecting to a shard requires the server host and IP for the mongo router, which is the mongos process.