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Use Environment Variables in MongoDB Shell Scripts

You can use environment variables in your MongoDB Shell scripts to manage configuration settings and store sensitive information outside of your source code. For example, environment variables let you store database connection strings, API keys, and other parameters outside of your main scripts.

About this Task

In the following example, you will learn how to use an environment variable for your MongoDB connection string.

There are multiple ways to load environment variables from a file into your script. This example uses the built-in loadEnvFile() function, which loads variables from an .env file into your application's environment.

Steps

Create a file to store your environment variable

In an empty directory, create a new file named .env.

Define an environment variable

In the .env file, define an environment variable for your MongoDB connection string:

MONGODB_URI="<connection-string>"

Write a script that uses the environment variable

In the same directory as your .env file, create a script called myScript.js and populate it with the following contents:

// Load environment variables from the .env file
const { loadEnvFile } = require('node:process');
loadEnvFile();
// Connect to the MongoDB database
db = connect(process.env.MONGODB_URI);
// Confirm the connection by printing the database name
console.log(db);

The script uses the process.env object to access your connection string environment variable.

Run your script

The script outputs the name of the database you connected to. The default database is test.

mongosh --file myScript.js

test

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