Reliably reconnect to MongoDB

There are 2 connection options that control how mongo nodejs driver reconnects after connection fails

• reconnectTries: attempt to reconnect #times (default 30 times)
• reconnectInterval: Server will wait # milliseconds between retries (default 1000 ms)

reference on mongo driver docs

Which means that mongo will keep trying to connect 30 times by default and wait 1 second before every retry. Which is why you start seeing errors after 30 seconds.

You should tweak these 2 parameters based on you needs like this sample.

var MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient,
    f = require('util').format;

MongoClient.connect('mongodb://localhost:27017/test', 
    {
        // retry to connect for 60 times
        reconnectTries: 60,
        // wait 1 second before retrying
        reconnectInterval: 1000
    },

    function(err, db) {
        var col = db.collection('t');

        setInterval(function() {
            col.insert({
                a: 1
            }, function(err, r) {
                console.log("insert")
                console.log(err)

                col.findOne({}, function(err, doc) {
                    console.log("findOne")
                    console.log(err)
                });
            })
        }, 1000)
    });

This will try 60 times instead of the default 30, which means that you'll start seeing errors after 60 seconds when it stops trying to reconnect.

Sidenote: if you want to prevent the app/request from waiting until the expiration of the reconnection period you have to pass the option bufferMaxEntries: 0. The price for this is that requests are also aborted during short network interruptions.

package.json: "mongodb": "3.1.3"

Reconnect existing connections

To fine-tune the reconnect configuration for pre-established connections, you can modify the reconnectTries/reconnectInterval options (default values and further documentation here).

Reconnect initial connection

For the initial connection, the mongo client does not reconnect if it encounters an error (see below). I believe it should, but in the meantime, I've created the following workaround using the promise-retry library (which uses an exponential backoff strategy).

const promiseRetry = require('promise-retry')
const MongoClient = require('mongodb').MongoClient

const options = {
  useNewUrlParser: true,
  reconnectTries: 60,
  reconnectInterval: 1000,
  poolSize: 10,
  bufferMaxEntries: 0
}

const promiseRetryOptions = {
  retries: options.reconnectTries,
  factor: 1.5,
  minTimeout: options.reconnectInterval,
  maxTimeout: 5000
}

const connect = (url) => {
  return promiseRetry((retry, number) => {
    console.log(`MongoClient connecting to ${url} - retry number: ${number}`)
    return MongoClient.connect(url, options).catch(retry)
  }, promiseRetryOptions)
}

module.exports = { connect }

Mongo Initial Connect Error: failed to connect to server [db:27017] on first connect

By default the Mongo driver will try to reconnect 30 times, one every second. After that it will not try to reconnect again.

You can set the number of retries to Number.MAX_VALUE to keep it reconnecting "almost forever":

    var connection = "mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/db";
    MongoClient.connect(connection, {
      server : {
        reconnectTries : Number.MAX_VALUE,
        autoReconnect : true
      }
    }, function (err, db) {

    });