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Create a MongoDB Atlas cluster

Once you are logged into your account, follow the steps from the documentation to create your free cluster. Once your cluster is up and running, you will be able to create your entites collection needed for your backend.

Set up access​

As part of the cluster creation process, you will be prompted to create a user. Use the username mern-k8s and password mern-k8s. You can use different values, but these are the values that will be used in the following examples.

Once the user is created, make sure that you go to the Network Access item in the left navigation menu, and enable access from your current IP address. If you want to use a different Kubernetes cluster later on, you will need to add the address too.

caution

To make it easier during this workshop, you can enable network access to 0.0.0.0/0. This will accept any incoming connection. You should never use this in production though.

Create a collection​

From the Atlas UI, you will see a Browse Collections button. Click it to see your existing collections.

Browse Collections

The Atlas UI with the Browse Collections button

At the moment, there shouldn't be any data in your cluster. If you'd like to explore what Atlas has to offer, you could add the sample data sets. For now, let's add our own data. Clicking on the Add My Own Data button will open up a modal prompting your for a database and collection names.

Create Database Modal

The Create Database modal

Use the name mern-k8s for the database, and use entities for your collection name.

Get your connection string

Go back to the Database item from the left navigation menu. You should see your cluster again. This click, click on the Connect button.

From the next modal, choose Connect using MongoDB Compass. This will show you the connection string to your cluster.

tip

While we won't be using MongoDB Compass in the context of this workshop, you still can look it up, it's a great UI for everything MongoDB related.

Connection String

The Connection String for Atlas

Copy this connection string, and save it somewhere handy as you'll need it soon. Make sure to replace password with your actual password.

tip

You can set this connection string as an environment variable so it will automatically be used in the following steps.

export ATLAS_CONNECTION_STRING=mongodb+srv://mernk8s:mernk8s@cluster0.wc3ix.mongodb.net/test

Make sure you replace the cluster id (wc3ix) with your own!