Is there a way to 'pretty' print MongoDB shell output to a file?

Question

Specifically, I want to print the results of a mongodb find() to a file. The JSON object is too large so I\'m unable to view the entire object with the shell wi

Answer 1

Using print and JSON.stringify you can simply produce a valid JSON result.
Use --quiet flag to filter shell noise from the output.
Use --norc flag to avoid .mongorc.js evaluation. (I had to do it because of a pretty-formatter that I use, which produces invalid JSON output) Use DBQuery.shellBatchSize = ? replacing ? with the limit of the actual result to avoid paging.

And finally, use tee to pipe the terminal output to a file:

// Shell:
mongo --quiet --norc ./query.js | tee ~/my_output.json

// query.js:
DBQuery.shellBatchSize = 2000;
function toPrint(data) {
  print(JSON.stringify(data, null, 2));
}

toPrint(
  db.getCollection('myCollection').find().toArray()
);

Hope this helps!