Appendix A. Installation
In this appendix you’ll learn how to install MongoDB on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and you’ll get at an overview of MongoDB’s most commonly used configuration options. For developers, there are a few notes on compiling MongoDB from its source.
We’ll conclude with some pointers on installing Ruby and RubyGems to aid those wanting to run the Ruby-based examples from the book.
Before we proceed to the installation instructions, a note on MongoDB versioning is in order. Briefly, you should run the latest stable version for your architecture. Stable releases of MongoDB are marked by an even minor version number. Thus, versions 1.8, 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 and 3.0 are stable; 2.1, 2.3, and 2.5 are development versions and shouldn’t be used in production. The downloads page at www.mongodb.org provides statically linked binaries compiled for 32- and 64-bit systems. But as of MongoDB v3.0, 32-bit binaries will no longer be supported. These binaries are available for the latest stable releases as well as for the development branches and nightly builds of the latest revision. The binaries provide an easy way to install MongoDB across most platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and Solaris, and they’re the method we’ll prefer here. If you run into trouble, you can find more information in the official MongoDB manual at http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation.