Hi everyone,
I’m currently automating the mongodump process for both our staging and production dbs using a Python script. For this use case, I only need to export the metadata — such as collection names, indexes, and validation rules—and exclude the actual data (i.e., .bson files).
Is there a way to use mongodump (or any other tool/option) to achieve a schema-only dump without including document data?
Any help or guidance would be much appreciated!
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Hey there 👋
As far as I know, mongodump doesn’t have a built-in flag to dump only metadata like collection names, indexes, and validation rules without the .bson data files. It always tries to include the data by default.
That said, one workaround might be to use --dumpDbUsersAndRoles and possibly combine that with empty collections (using --query '{}' --limit 0), but I’m honestly not sure if that captures indexes or validation rules reliably.
If you haven’t already, you could also look into using the listCollections and listIndexes commands directly via the Mongo shell or Python with pymongo. That might give you more precise control over what metadata you extract.
Hope that helps a bit! Would love to hear if you find a cleaner approach for this!
- Bobby
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