MongoDB to CSV

Every once in a while, I need to give a non-technical user (like a business analyst) data residing in MongoDB [1]; consequently, I export the target data as a CSV file [2] (which they can presumably slice and dice once they import it into Excel or some similar tool). Mongo has a handy export utility [3] that takes a bevy of options, however, there is an outstanding bug [4] and some general confusion [5] as to how to properly export data in CSV format.

Accordingly, if you need to export some specific data from MongoDB into CSV format, here’s how you do it. The key parameters are connection information to include authentication, an output file, and most important, a list of fields to export. What’s more, you can provide a query in escaped JSON format.

You can find the mongoexport utility in your Mongo installation bin directory. I tend to favor verbose parameter names and explicit connection information (i.e. rather than a URL syntax, I prefer to spell out the host, port, db, etc directly). As I’m targeting specific data, I’m going to specify the collection; what’s more, I’m going to further filter the data via a query.

ObjectId’s can be referenced via the $oid format; furthermore, you’ll need to escape all JSON quotes. For example, if my query is against a users collection and filtered by account_id (which is an ObjectId), the query via the mongo shell would be:

Mongo Shell Query1
db.users.find({account_id:ObjectId('5058ca07b7628c0002099006')})


Via the command line à la monogexport, this translates to:

Collections and queries1
--collection users --query "{\"account_id\": {\"\$oid\": \"5058ca07b7628c0002000006\"}}"


Finally, if you want to only export a portion of the fields in a user document, for example, name, email, and created_at, you need to provide them via the fields parameter like so:

Fields declaration1
--fields name,email,created_at


Putting it all together yields the following command:

Puttin’ it all together1
2
3
mongoexport --host mgo.acme.com --port 10332 --username acmeman --password 12345 \
--collection users --csv --fields name,email,created_at --out all_users.csv --db my_db \
--query "{\"account_id\": {\"\$oid\": \"5058ca07b7628c0999000006\"}}"


Of course, you can throw this into a bash script and parameterize the collection, fields, output file, and query with bash’s handy $1, $2, etc variables.

Got it?