Starting MongoDB on OS X

When you install MongoDB on a Mac with Homebrew, it spits out this important info:

To have launchd start mongodb at login:
    ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/mongodb/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
Then to load mongodb now:
    launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mongodb.plist
Or, if you don't want/need launchctl, you can just run:
    mongod --config /usr/local/etc/mongod.conf

This is important because the MongoDB docs tell you to run it by "sudo service mongodb start", which doesn't work on macs. Macs use "launchctl" instead of "service" (and they work differently). The things that they launch are defined by plist files in ~/Library/LaunchAgents.

There used to be a thing called "brew services", but now if you use that, it will tell you that it's unsupported and will be removed soon, so I guess don't use it.

Or if you just want to start it for a little while now, you could just start it with "mongod", but that doesn't work because you have to tell it where the config file is, which tells mongo where the database should be. Of course, you might not know where the config file or the database are. That's what the last line (mongod --config ...) is for.

Another tip: MongoDB logs are stored by default in:
/var/log/mongodb/mongodb.log