Add a User to a Database¶

To add a user to a database you must authenticate to that database as a user with the userAdmin or userAdminAnyDatabase role. If you have not first created a user with one of those roles, do so as described in Create a User Administrator.

When adding a user to multiple databases, you must define the user for each database. See Password Hashing Insecurity for important security information.

To add a user, pass the db.addUser() method a well formed privilege document that contains the user’s credentials and privileges. The db.addUser() method adds the document to the database’s system.users collection.

Changed in version 2.4: In previous versions of MongoDB, you could change an existing user’s password by calling db.addUser() again with the user’s username and their updated password. Anything specified in the addUser() method would override the existing information for that user. In newer versions of MongoDB, this will result in a duplicate key error.

To change a user’s password in version 2.4 or newer, see Change a User’s Password.

For the structure of a privilege document, see system.users. For descriptions of user roles, see User Privilege Roles in MongoDB.

Example

The following creates a user named Alice in the products database and gives her readWrite and dbAdmin privileges.

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use products
db.addUser( { user: "Alice",
              pwd: "Moon1234",
              roles: [ "readWrite", "dbAdmin" ]
            } )

Example

The following creates a user named Bob in the admin database. The privilege document uses Bob’s credentials from the products database and assigns him userAdmin privileges.

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use admin
db.addUser( { user: "Bob",
              userSource: "products",
              roles: [ "userAdmin" ]
            } )

Example

The following creates a user named Carlos in the admin database and gives him readWrite access to the config database, which lets him change certain settings for sharded clusters, such as to disable the balancer.

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db = db.getSiblingDB('admin')
db.addUser( { user: "Carlos",
              pwd: "Moon1234",
              roles: [ "clusterAdmin" ],
              otherDBRoles: { config: [ "readWrite" ]
            } } )

Only the admin database supports the otherDBRoles field.

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