MongoDB 2.6 does not start on Ubuntu 15.04

Question

I installed MongoDB 2.6 on clean installed Ubuntu 15.04:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 7F0CEB10
echo 'deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mongodb-org

It finished without any problems. However, when I tried to start it, I got the following error:

$ sudo service mongod start
Failed to start mongod.service: Unit mongod.service failed to load: No such file or directory.

How can I fix this?

score 65 · Answer 1 · edited May 20 '15 at 03:32

65

I installed from the debian wheeze repository and it works fine.

First make sure you remove the mongodb-org package and all its dependencies:

sudo apt-get purge mongodb-org
sudo apt-get autoremove

Remove the old mongodb.list you created:

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list

Use the Debian repository instead:

echo "deb http://repo.mongodb.org/apt/debian wheezy/mongodb-org/3.0 main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-3.0.list

Update and install again:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mongodb-org

After that, you can succesffully start the server:

sudo service mongod start

or

systemctl start mongod

(as clarified by Ernie Hershey in reply to Roman Gaufman's comment here: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17742)

edited May 20 '15 at 03:32

Jason Nikesh

3
2

answered May 08 '15 at 23:13

Dielson Sales

1,178

1

I tried that and got service not found when trying to start mongod – Zippo May 09 '15 at 07:51
2

Are you sure you autoremoved the dependencies? I got that too, but then I realized I hadn't removed all mongodb related packages. After removing all of them and installed from wheezy repository, it's working fine with systemd. – Dielson Sales May 10 '15 at 00:27
1

saved me a lot of headache – Srivathsa Harish Venkataramana May 12 '15 at 23:10
1

Thank you. Purge followed by autoremove (almost forgot it) did the trick. – Nenad Vukicevic May 31 '15 at 14:32
In my case on 14.04 but likely on 15.04 tailing /var/log/syslog, verifying the failed attempt then editing /etc/init/mongodb.confcan also help if you are using a non-standard data directory, log directory, or user instance. – Eat at Joes Jul 10 '15 at 17:14
I copy/pasted the above, but since purge prompted for answer, the next pasted line (autoremove) didn't get in. – Zlatko Sep 26 '15 at 11:55
Helpful, but doesn't answer OP's question which is about Mongo 2.6, not 3.0; does the debian wheezy distro have a 2.6 repo as well? – shashin Oct 19 '15 at 14:19
Can you also explain how to automate sudo service mongod start so that this happens at boot time – Hotbelgo Nov 27 '15 at 07:54
Works perfectly for me!!
Also, @shashin, if you want to pin a version, you can follow the instructions here: https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-ubuntu/#install-the-mongodb-packages
– Ajax Dec 18 '15 at 06:42

score 24 · Answer 2 · answered May 02 '15 at 15:41

24

The MongoDB team says they won't support Ubuntu 15.04 and plan to support 16.04 instead (see https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17742).

Ubuntu 15.04 advances the default init system from Upstart to systemd. I had no success starting MongoDB 3.0 with systemd.

You can switch back to Upstart by installing upstart-sysv:

sudo apt-get install upstart-sysv

Then reboot and MongoDB should be up.

I hope to find an easy way to run MongoDB on Ubuntu 15.04 without switching things back in time.

answered May 02 '15 at 15:41

Zippo

353

2

This is the best way to solve this problem by now. If anyone knows other ways, please share here. – Fernando Kosh May 04 '15 at 18:43
In my case installing upstart-sysv and restarting just crashes. – Didac Montero May 05 '15 at 09:30
@DidacMontero Look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers for other options – Zippo May 09 '15 at 07:49
Works for me on Ubuntu 15.04, thanks for the work-around! – Lil' Bits May 22 '15 at 13:50
this worked perfectly for me. – Oct 10 '15 at 02:26
Thanks fixed non-mongo services as well, it would be nice if the question is generalized i.e. init.d with ubuntu >15 , as thanks to google I ended up here unable to run my own service (spring boot) which has nothing to do with mongo whatseover. – Aubergine Apr 05 '16 at 21:57

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:37

4

You're installing from the packages published directly from mongodb.org. You should be installing from the packages supplied in the Ubuntu respository. The Debian/Ubuntu packages have been patched with systemd service units, to fill the hole left by mongodb.org.

(There's no shortage of mongodb.service unit files on the WWW. It's not hard to write one, either. I have.)

Specifically: you'll find such a service unit in the mongodb-server version 2.6 package for Ubuntu version 15. So just install that package.

(Note that the Debian/Ubuntu-supplied service units do not apply the mongo-recommended systemd service unit directives.)

[Unit]
Description=High-performance, schema-free document-oriented database
Documentation=man:mongod(1)
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
User=mongodb
Group=mongodb
RuntimeDirectory=mongod
PIDFile=/var/run/mongod/mongod.pid
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mongod -f /etc/mongod.conf --pidfilepath /var/run/mongod/mongod.pid --fork
TimeoutStopSec=5
KillMode=mixed

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

https://gist.github.com/benileo/ada486d73f58dd93a0ee

Make sure you set your data directory in /etc/mongod.conf

edited Feb 03 '16 at 09:00

A T

2,528

answered Nov 03 '15 at 21:12

benileo

165

1

This is the best solution. – J. Bruni Nov 22 '15 at 18:58
link no longer works – Hotbelgo Jan 17 '16 at 10:44
Fixed the link. – benileo Jan 18 '16 at 15:26
For sure, it's should be marked as the best solution. – Wédney Yuri Jul 20 '16 at 12:02

score 1 · Answer 5 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

Isn't this the best answer? From a duplicate question: https://askubuntu.com/a/694226/255468 by @sclausen

It's just the lack of a service file for systemd. No need to go back to upstart like Kartik did or use a different repository than described in https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/.

Create a file /lib/systemd/system/mongodb.service with the following content:

[Unit]
Description=High-performance, schema-free document-oriented database
After=network.target

[Service]
User=mongodb
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mongod --quiet --config /etc/mongodb.conf

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

score 1 · Answer 6 · edited Mar 09 '16 at 17:21

1

https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-17742

It seems that this possibly won't be fully fixed for >2.6.3 until Ubuntu 16.04, unless there is a strong outcry.

So the solution for me was to issue:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall mongodb

edited Mar 09 '16 at 17:21

techraf

3,316

answered Mar 09 '16 at 14:49

Fabien Thetis

111
1

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 03 '18 at 17:11

0

use "mongodb" instead of "mongod"

i.e

sudo service mongodb start

sudo service mongodb stop

answered Mar 03 '18 at 17:11

Yasitha Bandara

101

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Jun 16 '15 at 09:40

Many of these answers are related to Mongo 3.0, whereas the question asked specifically about 2.6.

I've had success installing 2.6 using the Debian repository from 10gen. This appears to work perfectly with Ubuntu 15.04.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 7F0CEB10
echo 'deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/debian-sysvinit dist 10gen' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb-org

Source: How to Install MongoDB 2.6 on Ubuntu 14.10, 14.04 and 12.04 LTS

Rohan_Paul · Answer 9 · 2015-09-03T01:20:15.590

While the question is for version 2.6. I was getting the exact same error Unit mongod.service failed to load in my Ubuntu 15.04 for version 3.0.6. Ultimately resolved using the same wheezy repository mentioned by Dielson Sales above.

And after the installation (following the steps detailed by @Dielson Sales) faced the above error. Here's how I finally resolved.

A) Change MongoDB's default data store files from /var/lib/mongodb to /data/db

First create the new /data/db directory sudo mkdir -p /data/db
Open mongod.conf file sudo gedit /etc/mongod.conf and change the “dbpath” line as below
Replace dbpath=/var/lib/mongodb TO dbpath=/data/db and save the file.
Then delete the old default /var/lib/mongodb
Now we must make all the directories/files owned by mongod user

B) So run sudo chown -R mongodb:mongodb /data/db

And now finally I can start mongo with sudo service mongod start

And chcek that the service is running with sudo systemctl status mongod - It should show a message similar to below

Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/mongod)

Active: active (running) since Thu 2015-09-03 04:57:49 IST; 7s ago

Have detailed my steps in my blog post

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Sep 08 '15 at 12:58

First, download mongodb:

curl -O https://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-x86_64-3.0.6.tgz

extract download:

tar -zxvf mongodb-linux-x86_64-3.0.6.tgz

run the mongod (mongodb-linux-x86_64-3.0.6.tgz/bin/mongod) with -dbpath attribute:

sudo ./mongod --dbpath /path/of/the/directory

It can be an empty directory any of your choice

and finally, run mongo (mongodb-linux-x86_64-3.0.6.tgz/bin/mongo)

./mongo

worked on my ubuntu 15 :)

sorry for my bad english , I live in Brazil

score 0 · Answer 11 · edited Jan 21 '16 at 05:32

After hours from searching, The solution was to upgrade my ubuntu from 15.04 to 16.04 using this command:

Step 1

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

It will take few minutes so dont panic, than you have to remove mongodb :

Step 2

sudo apt-get purge mongodb-org 
sudo apt-get autoremove`  
rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-3.0.list`

And now, install mongodb but using this source :

echo 'deb http://repo.mongodb.org/apt/debian wheezy/mongodb-org/3.0 main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-3.0.list

Step 3

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 7F0CEB10  
echo ‘deb http://repo.mongodb.org/apt/debian wheezy/mongodb-org/3.0 main’ | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-3.0.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb-org
sudo service mongod status

And that's it.

Note : If you get an error like ' E: the type 'deb' in the first line . . . in the file mongodb-org-3.0.list

all you have to do is to get in this file using gedit and delete the ‘ in the begin and at the end of the sentence.

This part "The solution was to upgrade my ubuntu from 15.04 to 16.04..." doesn't make sense at the moment, because 16.04 is not released yet. — , Jan 03 '16 at 06:50
@clearkimura Yes it is. Well, in alpha. And whatever, the second daily build of Ubuntu 16.04 is installed on my computer, and i've seen no problems. — Star OS, Jan 03 '16 at 09:04

A T · Answer 12 · 2016-02-03T06:16:08.600

Ubuntu 15.04+ uses systemd instead of upstart. Start with MongoDB's official install guide. Then use their official mongod.service:

[Unit]
Description=High-performance, schema-free document-oriented database

[Service]
User=mongod
Group=mongod
Environment="OPTIONS=--quiet -f /etc/mongod.conf"
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/mongod $OPTIONS run
PIDFile=/var/run/mongodb/mongod.pid

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Download, patch, install service and setup dir+permissions

$ curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mongodb/mongo/1663f45b4e33e058a0203a81f50574a870882c34/rpm/mongod.service
$ sed -i 's/\/usr\/local/\/usr/g' mongod.service
$ sed -i '/Desc/a After=network.target' mongod.service
$ sudo sed -i '0,/\/var\/lib\/mongodb/s//\/data\/db/' /etc/mongod.conf
$ sudo cp mongod.service /lib/systemd/system/mongo.service
$ sudo mkdir -p /data/db
$ sudo chown -R mongodb:mongodb /data
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable mongod

Start service

$ sudo systemctl start mongod

Check service status

$ sudo systemctl status mongod

score 0 · Answer 13 · edited May 04 '16 at 14:50

0

You made a typo in your command.

Try using this instead: sudo service mongodb start

edited May 04 '16 at 14:50

Thomas Ward

74,764

answered May 04 '16 at 13:24

erdem karayer

1

MongoDB 2.6 does not start on Ubuntu 15.04

13 Answers13

Further reading

Download, patch, install service and setup dir+permissions

Start service

Check service status

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