Remove duplicate in MongoDB

this is a good pattern for mongod 3+ that also ensures that you will not run our of memory which can happen with really big collections. You can save this to a dedup.js file, customize it, and run it against your desired database with: mongo localhost:27017/YOURDB dedup.js

var duplicates = [];

db.runCommand(
  {aggregate: "YOURCOLLECTION",
    pipeline: [
      { $group: { _id: { DUPEFIELD: "$DUPEFIELD"}, dups: { "$addToSet": "$_id" }, count: { "$sum": 1 } }},
      { $match: { count: { "$gt": 1 }}}
    ],
    allowDiskUse: true }
)
.result
.forEach(function(doc) {
    doc.dups.shift();
    doc.dups.forEach(function(dupId){ duplicates.push(dupId); })
})
printjson(duplicates); //optional print the list of duplicates to be removed

db.YOURCOLLECTION.remove({_id:{$in:duplicates}});

Yes, dropDups is gone for good. But you can definitely achieve your goal with little bit effort.

You need to first find all duplicate rows and then remove all except first.

db.dups.aggregate([{$group:{_id:"$contact_id", dups:{$push:"$_id"}, count: {$sum: 1}}},
{$match:{count: {$gt: 1}}}
]).forEach(function(doc){
  doc.dups.shift();
  db.dups.remove({_id : {$in: doc.dups}});
});

As you see doc.dups.shift() will remove first _id from array and then remove all documents with remaining _ids in dups array.

script above will remove all duplicate documents.