MongoDB Documentation, Release 3.0.4 Configure the Database Consider the following basic configuration which uses the YAML format : Or, if using the older .ini configuration file format: For most standalone servers, this is a sufficient base configuration. It makes several assumptions, but consider the following explanation: • fork is true , which enables a daemon mode for mongod , which detaches (i.e. “forks”) the MongoDB from the current session and allows you to run the database as a conventional server. • bindIp is 127.0.0.1 , which forces the server to only listen for requests on the localhost IP. Only bind to secure interfaces that the application-level systems can access with access control provided by system network filtering (i.e. “ firewall ”). • port is 27017 , which is the default MongoDB port for database instances. MongoDB can bind to any port. You can also filter access based on port using network filtering tools. New in version 2.6: mongod installed from official .deb (page 19) and .rpm (page 7) packages have the bind_ip configuration set to 127.0.0.1 by default. Note: UNIX-like systems require superuser privileges to attach processes to ports lower than 1024. • quiet is true . This disables all but the most critical entries in output/log file, and is not recommended for production systems. If you do set this option, you can use setParameter to modify this setting during run time. • dbPath is /srv/mongodb , which specifies where MongoDB will store its data files. /srv/mongodb and /var/lib/mongodb are popular locations. The user account that mongod runs under will need read and write access to this directory. • systemLog.path is /var/log/mongodb/mongod.log which is where mongod will write its output. If you do not set this value, mongod writes all output to standard output (e.g. stdout .) 5.1. Administration Concepts 193 processManagement: fork: true net: bindIp: 127.0.0.1 port: 27017 storage: dbPath: /srv/mongodb systemLog: destination: file path: "/var/log/mongodb/mongod.log" logAppend: true storage: journal: enabled: true fork = true bind_ip = 127.0.0.1 port = 27017 quiet = true dbpath = /srv/mongodb logpath = /var/log/mongodb/mongod.log logappend = true journal = true