You created the directory in the wrong place
/data/db means that it’s directly under the ‘/’ root directory, whereas you created ‘data/db’ (without the leading /) probably just inside another directory, such as the ‘/root’ homedirectory.
You need to create this directory as root
Either you need to use sudo , e.g. sudo mkdir -p /data/db
Or you need to do su - to become superuser, and then create the directory with mkdir -p /data/db
Note:
MongoDB also has an option where you can create the data directory in another location, but that’s generally not a good idea, because it just slightly complicates things such as DB recovery, because you always have to specify the db-path manually. I wouldn’t recommend doing that.
Edit:
the error message you’re getting is “Unable to create/open lock file: /data/db/mongod.lock errno:13 Permission denied”. The directory you created doesn’t seem to have the correct permissions and ownership — it needs to be writable by the user who runs the MongoDB process.
To see the permissions and ownership of the ‘/data/db/’ directory, do this: (this is what the permissions and ownership should look like)
$ ls -ld /data/db/ drwxr-xr-x 4 mongod mongod 4096 Oct 26 10:31 /data/db/
The left side ‘drwxr-xr-x’ shows the permissions for the User, Group, and Others. ‘mongod mongod’ shows who owns the directory, and which group that directory belongs to. Both are called ‘mongod’ in this case.
If your ‘/data/db’ directory doesn’t have the permissions and ownership above, do this:
First check what user and group your mongo user has:
# grep mongo /etc/passwd mongod:x:498:496:mongod:/var/lib/mongo:/bin/false
You should have an entry for mongod in /etc/passwd , as it’s a daemon.
sudo chmod 0755 /data/db sudo chown -R 498:496 /data/db # using the user-id , group-id
You can also use the user-name and group-name, as follows: (they can be found in /etc/passwd and /etc/group )
sudo chown -R mongod:mongod /data/db
that should make it work..
In the comments below, some people used this:
sudo chown -R `id -u` /data/db sudo chmod -R go+w /data/db
or
sudo chown -R $USER /data/db sudo chmod -R go+w /data/db
The disadvantage is that $USER is an account which has a login shell. Daemons should ideally not have a shell for security reasons, that’s why you see /bin/false in the grep of the password file above.
Check here to better understand the meaning of the directory permissions:
http://www.perlfect.com/articles/chmod.shtml
Maybe also check out one of the tutorials you can find via Google: “UNIX for beginners”