While working directly with the mongodb module is great, it's also a bit raw and lacks any sense of the developer friendliness that we've come to expect when working with frameworks such as Express in Node.js. Mongoose is a great third-party framework that makes working with MongoDB a breeze. It is an elegant mongodb object modeling for Node.js.

What that basically means is that Mongoose gives us the power to organize our database using schemas (also known as model definitions) and provides powerful features to our models, such as validation, virtual properties, and more. Mongoose is a great tool, as it makes working with collections and documents in MongoDB feel much more elegant. The original mongodb module is a dependency of Mongoose, so you can think of Mongoose as being a wrapper on top of mongodb, much like Express is a wrapper on top of Node.js--both abstract away a lot of the raw feeling and give you easier tools to work with directly.

It's important to note that Mongoose is still MongoDB, so everything you're familiar with and used to will work pretty much the same way; only the syntax will change slightly. This means that the queries, inserts, and updates that we know and love from MongoDB work perfectly fine with Mongoose.

The first thing we need to do is install Mongoose so that it's available to use within our mongotest project:

    $ npm install mongoose

After installation, let's take a look at some of the features that Mongoose has to offer and that we'll take advantage of to make our lives easier when developing apps that rely heavily on a MongoDB database.