Cannot connect to MongoDB in Azure

Question

I have a MongoDB on Azure and I am trying to connect to it using the npm module mongodb:

var mongoClient = require("mongodb").MongoClient;
mongoClient.connect("mongodb://myuser:[email protected]:10355/?ssl=true", function (err, db) {
  db.close();
});

Password

My password has the following characteristics:

• Contains letters, lowercase, uppercase
• No white space
• Contains numbers
• Contains special characters like =, @, $ and so on

Error

I get the following when executing the code above:

Error: Password contains an illegal unescaped character
    at parseConnectionString (C:\Users\myuser\Documents\myproj\node_modules\mongodb\lib\url_parser.js:280:13)

However the documentation does not tell much about how to solve this issue. I guess it is an encoding problem. How to fix this?

Answer 1

Characters like @ are restricted as they mess up the structure of the URL. The reason for this is because MongoDB interprets it as the @ separator. Instead of this:

var mongoClient = require("mongodb").MongoClient;
mongoClient.connect("mongodb://myuser:myp@[email protected]:10355/?ssl=true", function (err, db) {
  db.close();
});

use this

mongoClient.connect("mongodb://myuser:myp%[email protected]:10355/?ssl=true", { 
  uri_decode_auth: true 
}, function (err, db) {
  db.close();
});

To encode the password, use encodeURIComponent(password)

You can also use this syntax.

mongoClient.connect("mongodb://myhost.documents.azure.com:10355/?ssl=true", 
 {user: 'username', pass: 'p@ssword'}, function (err, db) {
  db.close();
});

On later versions, use

auth: {
       user: 'username',
       password: 'p@ssword',
    }

as below

mongoClient.connect("mongodb://myhost.documents.azure.com:10355/?ssl=true", {
  auth: {
   user: 'username',
   password: 'p@ssword',
  }}, function (err, db) {
  db.close();
});

Answer 2

MongoDB can now use a password with special characters. To do this, add an option to the connection { useNewUrlParser: true }:

const MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient;
const assert = require('assert');

const uri = 'mongodb://mydbname:pa$s;w@[email protected]:27017/admin';

MongoClient.connect(uri, { useNewUrlParser: true }, (err, db) => {
    assert.strictEqual(null, err);
    // ...
    db.close();
});