What's a clean way to stop mongod on Mac OS X?

Question

i'm running mongo 1.8.2 and trying to see how to cleanly shut it down on Mac.

on our ubuntu servers i can shutdown mongo cleanly from the mongo shell with:

> use admin
> db.shutdownServer()

but on my Mac, it does not kill the mongod process. the output shows that it 'should be' shutdown but when i ps -ef | grep mongo it shows me an active process. also, i can still open a mongo shell and query my dbs like it was never shutdown.

the output from my db.shutdownServer() locally is:

MongoDB shell version: 1.8.2
connecting to: test
> use admin                  
switched to db admin
> db.shutdownServer()
Tue Dec 13 11:44:21 DBClientCursor::init call() failed
Tue Dec 13 11:44:21 query failed : admin.$cmd { shutdown: 1.0 } to: 127.0.0.1
server should be down...
Tue Dec 13 11:44:21 trying reconnect to 127.0.0.1
Tue Dec 13 11:44:21 reconnect 127.0.0.1 failed couldn't connect to server 127.0.0.1
Tue Dec 13 11:44:21 Error: error doing query: unknown shell/collection.js:150

i know i can just kill the process but i'd like to do it more cleanly.

Answer 1

It's probably because launchctl is managing your mongod instance. If you want to start and shutdown mongod instance, unload that first:

launchctl unload -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.mongodb.mongod.plist

Then start mongod manually:

mongod -f path/to/mongod.conf --fork

You can find your mongod.conf location from ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.mongodb.mongod.plist.

After that, db.shutdownServer() would work just fine.

Added Feb 22 2014:

If you have mongodb installed via homebrew, homebrew actually has a handy brew services command. To show current running services:

brew services list

To start mongodb:

brew services start mongodb

To stop mongodb if it's already running:

brew services stop mongodb

Update

As edufinn pointed out in the comment, brew services is now available as user-defined command and can be installed with following command: brew tap gapple/services.

Answer 2

If you installed mongodb with homebrew, there's an easier way:

List mongo job with launchctl:

launchctl list | grep mongo

Stop mongo job:

launchctl stop <job label>

(For me this is launchctl stop homebrew.mxcl.mongodb)

Start mongo job:

launchctl start <job label>

Answer 3

Simple way is to get the process id of mongodb and kill it. Please note DO NOT USE kill -9 pid for this as it may cause damage to the database.

so, 1. get the pid of mongodb

$ pgrep mongo

you will get pid of mongo, Now

$ kill

You may use kill -15 as well

Answer 4

I prefer to stop the MongoDB server using the port command itself.

sudo port unload mongodb

And to start it again.

sudo port load mongodb

Answer 5

Check out these docs:

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Starting+and+Stopping+Mongo#StartingandStoppingMongo-SendingaUnixINTorTERMsignal

If you started it in a terminal you should be ok with a ctrl + 'c' -- this will do a clean shutdown.

However, if you are using launchctl there are specific instructions for that which will vary depending on how it was installed.

If you are using Homebrew it would be launchctl stop homebrew.mxcl.mongodb

Answer 6

This is an old question, but its one I found while searching as well.

If you installed with brew then the solution would actually be the this:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mongodb.plist