Can't connect to local (running) mongo using 'meteor mongo'

Question

I'm playing with meteor, Installed it on Ubuntu 14.10 & followed the todos tutorial. The Meteor run log:

$ meteor run
[[[[[ ~/bckd/homedir/learn/meteor/mycoolapp ]]]]]

=> Started proxy.                             
=> Started MongoDB.                           
=> Started your app.                          

=> App running at: http://localhost:3000/

When I try to connect to mongo via another terminal, I get:

$ meteor mongo
mongo: Meteor isn't running a local MongoDB server.
This command only works while Meteor is running your application locally. Start your
application first. (This error will also occur if you asked Meteor to use a different MongoDB
server with $MONGO_URL when you ran your application.)

If you're trying to connect to the database of an app you deployed with `meteor deploy`,
specify your site's name with this command.

Trying to work around this problem I looked at the mongo command, and soon enough I figured I can connect using:

$ mongo localhost:3001

So great, that's working and it seems that I am able to use that for the time being.

But... why is the official way: meteor mongo not working in my setup, and can I do anything to fix it?

Edit 5/6/2015

After creating another account on my ubuntu, logging in and creating a new app, I run it and managed to connect to the mongo instance as intended with the meteor mongo command (without sudo). I thought it could be a result of a difference in my environment variables so I compared the two (dumping both environments with the env command. There were some extra bash variables in my primary account so one by one I've unset them until I reached two identical environments (with the exceptions of home directory values, user names, auto-generated values for gnome session tokens and such). Despite those changes, the problem consists. Another wild guess of mine was that the ~/.meteor folder has gone evil on me. So, I've removed it and reinstalled meteor. That didn't fix it either. Whatever the problem is, it's pretty stubborn.

Answer 1

Try:

sudo meteor mongo

it worked for me on a Vagrant box :)

Answer 2

• You need to be the same user as the user who started Meteor.
• Also you need to connect from within the application directory.
• Can you connect to the database with the native MongoDB client?
• Try running sudo meteor mongo - maybe the Meteor/Node process is running as root.