MongoDB - admin user not authorized

Question

I was also scratching my head around the same issue, and everything worked after I set the role to be root when adding the first admin user.

use admin
db.createUser(
  {
    user: 'admin',
    pwd: 'password',
    roles: [ { role: 'root', db: 'admin' } ]
  }
);
exit;

If you have already created the admin user, you can change the role like this:

use admin;
db.grantRolesToUser('admin', [{ role: 'root', db: 'admin' }])

For a complete authentication setting reference, see the steps I've compiled after hours of research over the internet.

It's a bit confusing - I believe you will need to grant yourself readWrite to query a database. A user with dbadmin or useradmin can admin the database (including granting yourself additional rights) but cannot perform queries or write data.

so grant yourself readWrite and you should be fine -

http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/built-in-roles/#readWrite

Perhaps a quick example of how to change a current user will be helpful to somebody. This is what I was actually looking for.

Following advice of @JohnPetrone I added readWrite role to my admin user with grantRolesToUser

> use admin
> db.grantRolesToUser("admin",["readWrite"])
> show collections
system.users
system.version

You can try: Using the --authenticationDatabase flag helps.

mongo --port 27017 -u "admin" -p "password" --authenticationDatabase "admin"

I know this answer is coming really late on in this thread but I hope you check it out.

The reason you get that error is based on the specific role that you granted to the user, which you have gathered by now, and yes giving that user the role root will solve your problem but you must first understand what these roles do exactly before granting them to users.

In tutorial you granted the user the userAdminAnyDatabase role which basically give the user the ability to manage users of all your databases. What you were trying to do with your user was outside its role definition.

The root role has this role included in it definition as well as the readWriteAnyDatabase, dbAdminAnyDatabase and other roles making it a superuser (basically because you can do anything with it).

You can check out the role definitions to see which roles you will need to give you users to complete certain tasks. https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/built-in-roles/ Its not advisable to make all your users super ones :)

It's a simple question.

1. It's important that you must switch the target db NOT admin.

use yourDB

2. check your db authentication by

show users

3. If you get a {} empty object that is the question. You just need to type

db.createUser( { user: "yourUser", pwd: "password", roles: [ "readWrite", "dbAdmin" ] } )

or

db.grantRolesToUser('yourUser',[{ role: "dbAdmin", db: "yourDB" }])