This post explains how to use configuration management (Salt Stack) to completely control a MongoDB collection. In our example we want to control a store's collection of plans.

First we create a JSON representation of the collection.

mongodb/plan.json:

{ "_id" : { "$oid" : "4ef8b9e2be329f491d98f74b" }, "cost" : 20, "description" : "development", "name" : "good", "count" : 6000 } { "_id" : { "$oid" : "4ef8b9e8be329f491d98f74c" }, "cost" : 60, "description" : "freelancers", "name" : "better", "count" : 36000 } { "_id" : { "$oid" : "4ef8b9f0be329f491d98f74d" }, "cost" : 180, "description" : "production", "name" : "best", "count" : 162000 }

Next we configure a salt state formula to manage the JSON file and watch it for changes.

mongodb/init.sls:

# install mongodb server mongodb-server: pkg: - installed # manage the store's plan.json /tmp/plan.json: file.managed: - source: salt://mongodb/plan.json - user: root - group: root - mode: 644 # import the plan collection if it changes import-plan-collection: cmd.wait: - name: mongoimport --db=store --collection=plan --upsert /tmp/plan.json - require: - pkg: mongodb-server - watch: - file: /tmp/plan.json

Now whenever plan.json is altered in configuration management, the file on the minion will update which will trigger a mongoimport with upsert to occur.

Optionally, we could replace --upsert with --drop which will drop the collection before re-importing thus removing stale records.

We now have a version controlled JSON file in configuration management and the power of MongoDB Document Objects in our application code!