Importing records into MongoDB

In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how we can use mongoimport to quickly add records(or documents) into MongoDB from JSON or CSV file. We will walk through different structures of file to import documents from.

JSON

Consider a file employee.json which contains the employee’s information, each line represents a single document(or record), as shown below:

    { name:"John", city: "New York", state: "NY" }
    { name:"Miller", city: "Dallas", state: "TX" }
    { name:"James", city: "Los Angeles", state: "CA" }

Now to import these records into our local MongoDB, just run:

    mongoimport --db <db_name> --collection <collection_name> --file employee.json

Default file type used by mongoimport is JSON, so we don’t need to explicitly specify the --type here.

JSON Array

Let’s consider the same data as in above example(employee.json) but in JSONArray format as shown below:

    [
     { name:"John", city: "New York", state: "NY" },
       { name:"Miller", city: "Dallas", state: "TX" },
      { name:"James", city: "Los Angeles", state: "CA" }
     ]

To import these records into our local MongoDB, just use --jsonArray parameter:

    mongoimport --db <db_name> --collection <collection_name> --file employee.json --jsonArray

CSV with headerline

Let’s consider the same data as above in CSV format(employee.csv):

    "Name", "City", "State"
    "John", "New York", "NY"
    "Miller", "Dallas",  "TX"
    "James", "Los Angeles", "CA"

Use the below command to import these records and specify --headerline parameter, so that mongoimport determines the fields from the first line:

    mongoimport --db <db_name> --collection <collection_name> --type csv --headerline --file employee.csv

CSV without headerline

Let’s take the same csv file from above example but without the headerline.

    "John", "New York", "NY"
    "Miller", "Dallas",  "TX"
    "James", "Los Angeles", "CA"

To specify the fields use --fields or -f option followed by comma sperated field names.

    mongoimport --db <db_name> --collection <collection_name> --type csv --file employee.csv --fields name,city,state

or alternatively we can also use --fieldFile option, which allows to specify the file which contains fields name.

Import JSON to remote Host

In above examples we have considered that MongoDB is running locally. If we want to import records into MongoDB instance running on some remote host, we can use the following command:

    mongoimport --host <host_address> --port <port_no> --db <db_name> --collection <coll_name> --file employee.json

There are a lot more options in mongoimport, which I have not covered in this blog. Please refer to mongoimport documentation for more information.

Thank you for reading.