Posts tagged Hostmonster

This was written in April of 2009. It is very out of date. See http://rcrisman.net/article/11/installing-mongodb-on-hostmonster-bluehost-accounts for more up-to-date information (as of August 2010). Keep in mind that shared hosting with Hostmonster is very lame. They only lets you run a program for 5 minutes before killing it, so it’s fairly useless to install MongoDB unless you have a dedicated IP.

I finally got MongoDB working on this site, so I’m going to start switching stuff over from MySQL. I’m biased, but I think it’s just an easier database to use.

And, because I like writing tutorials… How I did it:

1. Downloaded the binary I created of MongoDB for “legacy” Linux. I originally compiled this for a user on Mandriva 2006 (see previous post about VMWare), but it works fine for other old Linux distros, too.
2. Run:

   $ tar zxvf mongodb-linux-i686-old-linux-1.tgz

3. Make a directory for the database to put files in:

   $ mkdir /home/user/data

4. Upload libjava.so, libjvm.so, and libverify.so. Make sure they have execute permissions and put them somewhere like /home/user/lib.
5. Run:

   $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/user/lib

   replacing the path wherever you put the .so’s above.

6. Start the database:

   $ cd mongodb-linux-i686-old-linux-1
   $ bin/mongod --dbpath /home/user/data --nojni run

I cheated a bit and didn’t install Java, so I had to use the –nojni option. If you install Java, you won’t need that (and you won’t need to upload the individual .so files).

Now, what good is a database if you can’t use it, right? So, I downloaded my PHP driver (go to its Github repository and click “Download” for the latest version). I then followed the install instructions and put the .so generated by make in /home/user/extensions.

I changed the options under “PHP Config” in Hostmonster’s CPanel to use php.ini in /home/user/public_html/php.ini, and then edited that file to use my extension.

I made a simple test page with:

<?php
include "Mongo.php";
$m = new Mongo();
echo $m;
?>

Which connected me to MongoDB, showing:

localhost:27017

when I loaded the page!