The life of a polygot programmer is never done. Changing from language to language frequently can leave heads muddled and hair tousled. So whenever something takes me longer than it should, either due to complexity or hangover - I tend to write it up either in a gist or blog post. So here’s one I struggled with for a while and it’s not that hard.
I wanted to create a quick script to hit a MongoDb database. “But this is not a difficult task” I hear some say. My issue was one of tools rather than code. I spend a lot of my time switching between .Net, nodejs, bash and ruby. None of which i find good for small scripts either due to portability, setup or the programming style. I wanted to find a solution that one I bootstrapped I would be able to do similar scripts in minutes. So my time was spent debating the pros and cons of various scripting languages over implementing the few lines of code. Eventually I settled on python, mainly because I am very amateur at it and figured it’s a great tool for little jobs like this.
First, I assume you have MongoDb somewhere, in this case installed on your local server.
Now if you don’t have pythong installed, well install it using Distribute, the python setup manager.
curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
python distribute_setup.py
easy_install pip
We’re also going to install pymongo, a package for accessing MongoDB.
python -m pip install pymongo
And finally here’s some python to hit the database:
import pymongo
connection = pymongo.Connection("localhost", 27017)
db = connection.test
db.name
db.my_collection.save({"Name": "John"})
db.my_collection.save({"Name": "Frank"})
db.my_collection.save({"Name": "Bill"})
db.my_collection.find_one()
for item in db.my_collection.find(): print item["Name"]