show dbs gives “Not Authorized to execute command” error

Question

I\'ve spent some time trying to figure out what is wrong but as I could not find out, I decided to ask here.

I am running MongoDB(Windows 64-bit 2008 R2+) version 3.

Answer 1

You should have started the mongod instance with access control, i.e., the --auth command line option, such as:

$ mongod --auth

Let's start the mongo shell, and create an administrator in the admin database:

$ mongo
> use admin
> db.createUser(
  {
    user: "myUserAdmin",
    pwd: "abc123",
    roles: [ { role: "userAdminAnyDatabase", db: "admin" } ]
  }
)

Now if you run command "db.stats()", or "show users", you will get error "not authorized on admin to execute command..."

> db.stats()
{
        "ok" : 0,
        "errmsg" : "not authorized on admin to execute command { dbstats: 1.0, scale: undefined }",
        "code" : 13,
        "codeName" : "Unauthorized"
}

The reason is that you still have not granted role "read" or "readWrite" to user myUserAdmin. You can do it as below:

> db.auth("myUserAdmin", "abc123")
> db.grantRolesToUser("myUserAdmin", [ { role: "read", db: "admin" } ])

Now You can verify it (Command "show users" now works):

> show users
{
        "_id" : "admin.myUserAdmin",
        "user" : "myUserAdmin",
        "db" : "admin",
        "roles" : [
                {
                        "role" : "read",
                        "db" : "admin"
                },
                {
                        "role" : "userAdminAnyDatabase",
                        "db" : "admin"
                }
        ]
}

Now if you run "db.stats()", you'll also be OK:

> db.stats()
{
        "db" : "admin",
        "collections" : 2,
        "views" : 0,
        "objects" : 3,
        "avgObjSize" : 151,
        "dataSize" : 453,
        "storageSize" : 65536,
        "numExtents" : 0,
        "indexes" : 3,
        "indexSize" : 81920,
        "ok" : 1
}

This user and role mechanism can be applied to any other databases in MongoDB as well, in addition to the admin database.

(MongoDB version 3.4.3)