On macOS, we can quickly setup a MongoDB server with the following CLI commands.

Prerequisites #

• Homebrew installed and configured

Install and launch MongoDB #

In your terminal:
brew install mongodb-community

Then start it with:
brew services start mongodb-community

brew services list should now list your running mongodb service.

Explore the MongoDB Shell #

You can get a shell to interact with your database server with the command mongosh. It will connect to the default location of 127.0.0.1, port 27017. The help command will get you started.

show databases # list available databases
use <database_name> # switch to database_name
show collections # list all collections in db
db.<collection_name>.find() # list all items in collection

When you're done exploring, you can stop the service with brew services stop mongodb-community.