PyMongo/Mongoengine equivalent of mongodump

mongodb, mongoengine, pymongo, python

Solution

For my relatively small small database, I eventually used the following solution. It's not really suitable for big or complex databases, but it suffices for my case. It dumps all documents as a json to the backup directory. It's clunky, but it does not rely on other stuff than pymongo.

from os.path import join
import pymongo
from bson.json_utils import dumps

def backup_db(backup_db_dir):
    client = pymongo.MongoClient(host=<host>, port=<port>)
    database = client[<db_name>]
    authenticated = database.authenticate(<uname>,<pwd>)
    assert authenticated, "Could not authenticate to database!"
    collections = database.collection_names()
    for i, collection_name in enumerate(collections):
        col = getattr(database,collections[i])
        collection = col.find()
        jsonpath = collection_name + ".json"
        jsonpath = join(backup_db_dir, jsonpath)
        with open(jsonpath, 'wb') as jsonfile:
            jsonfile.write(dumps(collection))

Problem

Is there an equivalent function in `PyMongo` or `mongoengine` to MongoDB's `mongodump`? I can't seem to find anything in the docs. Use case: I need to periodically backup a remote mongo database. The local machine is a production server that does not have mongo installed, and I do not have admin rights, so I can't use `subprocess` to call `mongodump`. I could install the mongo client locally on a virtualenv, but I'd prefer an API call. Thanks a lot :-).

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