How to Restore a MongoDB Database from Compass

I often find that I want to restore a MongoDB database locally from MongoDB (Preview database) Atlas to determine if I've made any breaking changes.

Restoring your MongoDB database

1. Download a backup from MongoDB Atlas.
2. Unzip the backup. In this case, I unzipped it to my Downloads directory as dump.
3. run a Docker container with the following flags:
   • -p <TO>:<FROM> - To is the port that you are serving on your local machine and From is the container's process port for Mongo (unless specified otherwise, it's 27017)
   • -v <LOCAL DB DIRECTORY>:<DOCKER DB PATH> - Local DB Directory is where I unzipped the backup. Docker DB Path is the directory Mongo will use to serve a database. Unless specified otherwise, this is /data/db

     docker container run -p 27018:27017 -v $HOME/Downloads/dump:/data/db mongo:5.0.7
     

Accessing your MongoDB database

Now from Mongo Compass you should be able to connect to your locally running Mongo instance with this connection string:

mongodb://@localhost:27018?authSource=admin&readPreference=primary&directConnection=true&ssl=false

Notice the 27018? In this case, because that's the port I designated for Mongo to serve from on my computer, this is the port I want to connect to.