How to Use the mongoimport to Import a JSON file into a MongoDB Server

Summary: in this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the mongoimport tool to import a JSON file into a local MongoDB database server.

Download & install the mongoimport tool

To import JSON files into the MongoDB server, you use the mongoimport tool. Starting from MongoDB 4.4, the mongoimport tool is released separately from the MongoDB server. Therefore, you need to download and install it:

• First, download the mongoimport tool on this page.
• Second, follow this instruction to install the mongoimport tool.

Download the JSON sample file

The following books.json file contains 431 documents about books.

Before importing it into your local MongoDB database server, you need to click the following download button:

Note that the downloaded file is in the zip format, you need to extract it to books.json file.

Import the books.json to a MongoDB database server

First, open the Terminal on macOS and Linux or Command Prompt on Windows.

Second, navigate to the database tools directory where the mongoimport tool is located. On Windows, it’s C:\Program Files\MongoDB\Tools\100\bin where 100 is the version of the tool.

Third, use the following command to import the books.json file into the MongoDB database server:

mongoimport c:\data\books.json -d bookdb -c books --drop
Code language: Shell Session (shell)

In this command:

• First, start with the mongoimport program name.
• Next, specify the path to the books.json data file. In this example, it is c:\data\books.json.
• Then, use -d bookdb to specify the target database, which is bookdb in this example.
• After that, use -c books to specify the target collection, which is books in this case.
• Finally, use the --drop flag to drop the collection if it exists before importing the data.

If the import was successful, you will see the following output:

2022-02-22T14:30:10.869+0700    connected to: mongodb://localhost/
2022-02-22T14:30:10.872+0700    dropping: bookdb.books
2022-02-22T14:30:10.926+0700    431 document(s) imported successfully. 0 document(s) failed to import.
Code language: Shell Session (shell)

Fourth, type the following command from the terminal to connect to the bookdb database on the local database using mongo shell:

mongosh bookdb
Code language: Shell Session (shell)

Fourth, use the countDocuments() method to return the number of documents in the books collection:

db.books.countDocuments()
Code language: Shell Session (shell)

It returned 431 documents.

Finally, use the find() method to return the document with the_id 1 to examine the document:

db.books.find({"_id":1})
Code language: Shell Session (shell)

In this tutorial, you’ve learned how to use the mongoimport tool to import books.json into the local MongoDB database server.