How can I promisify the MongoDB native Javascript driver using bluebird?

Question

I\'d like to use the MongoDB native JS driver with bluebird promises. How can I use Promise.promisifyAll() on this library?

Answer 1

I know this has been answered several times, but I wanted to add in a little more information regarding this topic. Per Bluebird's own documentation, you should use the 'using' for cleaning up connections and prevent memory leaks. Resource Management in Bluebird

I looked all over the place for how to do this correctly and information was scarce so I thought I'd share what I found after much trial and error. The data I used below (restaurants) came from the MongoDB sample data. You can get that here: MongoDB Import Data

// Using dotenv for environment / connection information
require('dotenv').load();
var Promise = require('bluebird'),
    mongodb = Promise.promisifyAll(require('mongodb'))
    using = Promise.using;

function getConnectionAsync(){
    // process.env.MongoDbUrl stored in my .env file using the require above
    return mongodb.MongoClient.connectAsync(process.env.MongoDbUrl)
        // .disposer is what handles cleaning up the connection
        .disposer(function(connection){
            connection.close();
        });
}

// The two methods below retrieve the same data and output the same data
// but the difference is the first one does as much as it can asynchronously
// while the 2nd one uses the blocking versions of each
// NOTE: using limitAsync seems to go away to never-never land and never come back!

// Everything is done asynchronously here with promises
using(
    getConnectionAsync(),
    function(connection) {
        // Because we used promisifyAll(), most (if not all) of the
        // methods in what was promisified now have an Async sibling
        // collection : collectionAsync
        // find : findAsync
        // etc.
        return connection.collectionAsync('restaurants')
            .then(function(collection){
                return collection.findAsync()
            })
            .then(function(data){
                return data.limit(10).toArrayAsync();
            });
    }
// Before this ".then" is called, the using statement will now call the
// .dispose() that was set up in the getConnectionAsync method
).then(
    function(data){
        console.log("end data", data);
    }
);

// Here, only the connection is asynchronous - the rest are blocking processes
using(
    getConnectionAsync(),
    function(connection) {
        // Here because I'm not using any of the Async functions, these should
        // all be blocking requests unlike the promisified versions above
        return connection.collection('restaurants').find().limit(10).toArray();
    }
).then(
    function(data){
        console.log("end data", data);
    }
);

I hope this helps someone else out who wanted to do things by the Bluebird book.