Node mongodb: Error: connection closed due to parseError

mongodb, node-mongodb-native, node.js

Solution

Answering my own question to hopefully stop the next person from tearing their hair out:

As noted here, this error message is useless and doesn't relate to the actual problem. The production Mongo driver throws away all errors in a catch block.

To find what the error actually is:

open your `node_modules/mongodb`

find `server.js`

look for `mongoReply.parseBody`

log the `err` to see something actually useful.

In my case:

ReferenceError: collection is not defined

Edit: Node MongoDB native 1.4 is now stable, and includes a fix to this bug.

Problem

Using the native 'mongodb' npm package, I'm receiving ``` Error: connection closed due to parseError ``` When making a very basic query: ``` collections.myCollection.findOne({id: someID}, function (err, repo) { ... }) ``` The weird thing is, the exact same query has run before. Types are identical for each query, etc.

Original source