Configuring Access Control

One of the first administration tasks that you will want to perform in the MongoDB shell is to add users to configure access control. MongoDB provides authentication and authorization at the database level, meaning that users exist in the context of a single database. For basic authentication purposes, MongoDB stores user credentials inside a collection call system.users in each database.

Initially, the admin database does not have any users assigned to it. When no users are defined in the admin database, MongoDB allows connections on the local host to have full administrative access to the database. Therefore, your first step in setting up a new MongoDB instance is to create user administrator and database administrator accounts. The user administrator account has the ability to create user accounts in admin and other databases. You also need to create a database administrator account that you can use as a superuser to manage databases, clustering, replication, and other aspects of MongoDB.