To connect to our MongoDB database from inside of Node.js, we're going to be using an npm module created by the MongoDB team. It's called node-mongodb-native, but it includes all of the features you'll need to connect to and interact with your database. To get to it, we're going to Google node-mongodb-native:

The GitHub repo, which should be the first link, is the one we want—the node-mongodb-native repository—and if we scroll down, we can take a look at a few important links:

First up we have documentation, and we also have our api-docs; these are going to be critical as we start exploring the features that we have inside of this library. If we scroll down further on this page, we'll find a ton of examples on how to get started. We'll be going through a lot of this stuff in this chapter, but...

Now that you have inserted some documents into your MongoDB collections, I want to take a moment to talk about the _id property in the context of MongoDB because it's a little different than the IDs that you're probably used to if you've used other database systems, like Postgres or MySQL.

To kick off our discussion of the _id property, let's go ahead and rerun the mongodb-connect file. This is going to insert a new document into the Users collection, like we've defined in the db.collection line. I'm going to go ahead and do that by running the file through the node. It's in the playground folder, and the file itself is called mongodb...

Now that you know how to insert data into your database, let's go ahead and talk about how we can fetch data out of it. We're going to be using this technique in the Todo API. People are going to want to populate a list of all the Todo items they need, and they might want to fetch the details about an individual Todo item. All of this is going to require that we can query the MongoDB database.

Now, we're going to create a new file based off of mongodb-connect. In this new file, instead of inserting records, we'll fetch records from the database. I'm going to create a duplicate, calling this new file mongodb-find, because find is the method we're going...

Before we go any further, I do want to add version control to this project. In this section, we're going to create a new repo locally, make a new GitHub repository, and push our code to that GitHub repository. If you're already familiar with Git or GitHub, you can go ahead and do that on your own; you don't need to go through this section. If you're new to Git and it doesn't make sense just yet, that's also fine. Simply follow along, and we'll go through the whole process.

This section is going to be really simple; nothing MongoDB- related here. To get started, I am going to go ahead and initialize a new Git repository from the Terminal by using git init. This is going to initialize a new repository, and I can always run git status like this to take a look at the files that are untracked:

Here we have our playground folder...

In this section, you're going to learn how to delete documents from your MongoDB collections. Before we get into that, in order to explore the methods that let us delete multiple documents or just one, we want to create a few more Todos. Currently, the Todos collection only has two items, and we're going to need a few more in order to play around with all these methods involving deletion.

Now, I do have two. I'm going to go ahead and create a third by right-clicking and then going to Insert Document.... We'll make a new document with a text property equal to something like Eat lunch, and we'll set completed equal to false:

{
   text: 'Eat lunch',
   completed: false
}

Now before we save this, I am going to copy it to the clipboard. We're going to create a few duplicate Todos so we can see how we can delete items based...

You know how to insert, delete, and fetch documents out of MongoDB. In this section, you're going to learn how to update documents in your MongoDB collections. To kick things off, as usual, we're going to duplicate the last script we wrote, and we'll update it for this section.

I'm going to duplicate the mongodb-delete file, renaming it to mongodb-update.js, and this is where we'll write our update statements. I'm also going to delete all of the statements we wrote, which is the deleted data. Now that we have this in place, we can explore the one method we'll be looking at in this section. This one is called findOneAndUpdate. It's kind of similar to findOneAndDelete. It lets us update an item and get the new document back. So if I update a Todo, set it as completed equal to true, I will get that document back in the response...