mongodb.mdx

title	MongoDB
label	MongoDB
order	50
desc	Payload has supported MongoDB natively since we started. The flexible nature of MongoDB lends itself well to Payload's powerful fields.
keywords	MongoDB, documentation, typescript, Content Management System, cms, headless, javascript, node, react, nextjs

To use Payload with MongoDB, install the package @payloadcms/db-mongodb. It will come with everything you need to store your Payload data in MongoDB.

Then from there, pass it to your Payload Config as follows:

import { mongooseAdapter } from '@payloadcms/db-mongodb'

export default buildConfig({
  // Your config goes here
  collections: [
    // Collections go here
  ],
  // Configure the Mongoose adapter here
  db: mongooseAdapter({
    // Mongoose-specific arguments go here.
    // URL is required.
    url: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
  }),
})

Options

Option	Description
autoPluralization	Tell Mongoose to auto-pluralize any collection names if it encounters any singular words used as collection slugs.
bulkOperationsSingleTransaction	When true, bulk update and delete operations will process documents one at a time in separate transactions instead of all at once in a single transaction. Useful for avoiding transaction limitations with large datasets in DocumentDB and Cosmos DB. Defaults to false.
connectOptions	Customize MongoDB connection options. Payload will connect to your MongoDB database using default options which you can override and extend to include all the options available to mongoose.
collectionsSchemaOptions	Customize Mongoose schema options for collections.
disableIndexHints	Set to true to disable hinting to MongoDB to use 'id' as index. This is currently done when counting documents for pagination, as it increases the speed of the count function used in that query. Disabling this optimization might fix some problems with AWS DocumentDB. Defaults to false
migrationDir	Customize the directory that migrations are stored.
transactionOptions	An object with configuration properties used in transactions or false which will disable the use of transactions.
collation	Enable language-specific string comparison with customizable options. Available on MongoDB 3.4+. Defaults locale to "en". Example: { strength: 3 }. For a full list of collation options and their definitions, see the MongoDB documentation.
allowAdditionalKeys	By default, Payload strips all additional keys from MongoDB data that don't exist in the Payload schema. If you have some data that you want to include to the result but it doesn't exist in Payload, you can set this to true. Be careful as Payload access control won't work for this data.
allowIDOnCreate	Set to true to use the id passed in data on the create API operations without using a custom ID field.
disableFallbackSort	Set to true to disable the adapter adding a fallback sort when sorting by non-unique fields, this can affect performance in some cases but it ensures a consistent order of results.
useAlternativeDropDatabase	Set to true to use an alternative dropDatabase implementation that calls collection.deleteMany({}) on every collection instead of sending a raw dropDatabase command. Payload only uses dropDatabase for testing purposes. Defaults to false.
useBigIntForNumberIDs	Set to true to use BigInt for custom ID fields of type 'number'. Useful for databases that don't support double or int32 IDs. Defaults to false.
useJoinAggregations	Set to false to disable join aggregations (which use correlated subqueries) and instead populate join fields via multiple find queries. Defaults to true.
usePipelineInSortLookup	Set to false to disable the use of pipeline in the $lookup aggregation in sorting. Defaults to true.

Access to Mongoose models

After Payload is initialized, this adapter exposes all of your Mongoose models and they are available for you to work with directly.

You can access Mongoose models as follows:

• Collection models - payload.db.collections[myCollectionSlug]
• Globals model - payload.db.globals
• Versions model (both collections and globals) - payload.db.versions[myEntitySlug]

Using other MongoDB implementations

You can import the compatibilityOptions object to get the recommended settings for other MongoDB implementations. Since these databases aren't officially supported by payload, you may still encounter issues even with these settings (please create an issue or PR if you believe these options should be updated):

import { mongooseAdapter, compatibilityOptions } from '@payloadcms/db-mongodb'

export default buildConfig({
  db: mongooseAdapter({
    url: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
    // For example, if you're using firestore:
    ...compatibilityOptions.firestore,
  }),
})

We export compatibility options for DocumentDB, Azure Cosmos DB and Firestore. Known limitations:

• Azure Cosmos DB does not support transactions that update two or more documents in different collections, which is a common case when using Payload (via hooks).
• Azure Cosmos DB requires the root config property indexSortableFields to be set to true.

Using collation

There are situations where you may want to use language-specific string comparison, for example when sorting strings with accents or in different languages. MongoDB supports this via collation.

We thread your locale automatically through to the MongoDB queries when collation is enabled in the adapter, so that when you sort by a field, it uses the correct language rules for that locale.

To enable collation, set the collation option in the adapter configuration:

import { mongooseAdapter } from '@payloadcms/db-mongodb'

export default buildConfig({
  // Your config goes here
  collections: [
    // Collections go here
  ],
  // Configure the Mongoose adapter here
  db: mongooseAdapter({
    // Mongoose-specific arguments go here.
    // URL is required.
    url: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
    collation: {
      // Set any MongoDB collation options here.
      // The locale will be set automatically based on the request locale.
      strength: 1, // Example option
    },
  }),
})

Collation will affect things like sort based on the locale being used. Please test thoroughly before using in production as it can affect your queries.