Mongo 7 on Ubuntu 20 fails to start

Posted on September 7, 2023

I have installed Mongo 7.0 Community on my recently updated Droplet Ubuntu 18 -> 20. Following the instrctions from here https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-mongodb-on-ubuntu-20-04.

when running the sudo systemctl status mongod command I get

mongod.service - MongoDB Database Server
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/mongod.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Thu 2023-09-07 19:35:20 UTC; 6s ago
       Docs: https://docs.mongodb.org/manual
    Process: 48528 ExecStart=/usr/bin/mongod --config /etc/mongod.conf (code=exited, status=14)
   Main PID: 48528 (code=exited, status=14)

There were some SO that referred to changing the permissions on /var/lib/mongo I have tried that as well to no avail.

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fredblueshoon

September 27, 2023

Accepted Answer

This may have not been the correct way to fix this but it worked for me. I deleted everything so don’t do this if you’re upgrading/ don’t have a backup. I didn’t need one.

sudo apt-get remove mongodb-org
sudo apt-get purge mongodb-ord*
sudo rm -r /var/log/mongodb
sudo rm -r /var/lib/mongodb
sudo apt autoremove

Then started again with the directions from the post.

KFSys

September 8, 2023

Heya,

From that information alone it would be very hard to pinpoint the exact issue.

Check your Error log and see what it say when you try to start your Mongo service. It should give a more detailed error and reason why this is happening.

alexdo

September 14, 2023

You can find more detailed information about the error in the MongoDB log files. By default, MongoDB logs to /var/log/mongodb/mongodb.log.

You can view the log using a command like this:

sudo cat /var/log/mongodb/mongodb.log

Look for any error messages or stack traces that may provide more context about what went wrong during startup.

Check for conflicting processes: Sometimes, another process might be using the same port as MongoDB, causing it to fail. You can use the netstat or ss command to check for processes listening on MongoDB’s port (default is 27017):

sudo netstat -tuln | grep 27017

Check for available disk space: MongoDB may fail to start if there isn’t enough disk space available on your Droplet. Check the available disk space using the df command:
Restart MongoDB: Try restarting MongoDB to see if it resolves the issue: