I recently bought a new iMac and moved all of my files over using Time Machine. The migration went really well overall and within a few hours I had my development machine up and running. After starting an application I’m building I quickly realized that I couldn’t get MongoDB to start. Running the following command resulted in an error about the data/db directory being read-only:
Installing MongoDB on Mac Catalina using Homebrew This entry was posted in MongoDB and tagged Security troubleshooting on January 10, 2020 by Dan Wahlin I recently bought a new iMac and moved all of my files over using Time Machine. MongoDB installation fail - MacOs Catalina. I've trying to install Mongodb on my MacOs catalina, but i've going through some issues.I know the data/db directory is not created anymore during the instalation, and i've tried some tricks like create the data/db directory manually, but when i type the command 'mongod -dbpath /data/db', the.
I tried every chmod and chown command known to man and woman kind, tried manually changing security in Finder, compared security to my other iMac (they were the same), and tried a bunch of other things as well. But, try as I might I still saw the read-only folder error when trying to start the server….very frustrating. I found a lot of posts with the same issue but they all solved it by changing security on the folder. That wasn’t the problem on my machine.
After doing more research I found out that Catalina added a new volume to the hard drive and creates a special folder where the MongoDB files need to go. The new folder is:
Mongodb Mac Os Catalina Update
The MongoDB files can then go at:
Mongodb Mac Os Catalina Free
I ran the following commands to install the latest version of MongoDB using Homebrew (see https://github.com/mongodb/homebrew-brew for more details):
I then went into the MongoDB config file at /usr/local/etc/mongod.conf. Note that it’s possible yours may be located in a different location based on how you installed MongoDB. I changed the dbPath value to the following and copied my existing DB files into the folder:
Finally, I made sure my account had the proper access to the folder by running chown (something I had tried many times earlier but on a folder outside of /System/Volumes/Data):
Mongodb Mac Os Catalina Download
After that I was able to start MongoDB and everything was back to normal. Hopefully this saves someone a few hours – I wasted way too much time on the issue. 🙂