This was written in April of 2009. It is very out of date. See http://rcrisman.net/article/11/installing-mongodb-on-hostmonster-bluehost-accounts for more up-to-date information (as of August 2010). Keep in mind that shared hosting with Hostmonster is very lame. They only lets you run a program for 5 minutes before killing it, so it’s fairly useless to install MongoDB unless you have a dedicated IP.
I finally got MongoDB working on this site, so I’m going to start switching stuff over from MySQL. I’m biased, but I think it’s just an easier database to use.
And, because I like writing tutorials… How I did it:
- Downloaded the binary I created of MongoDB for “legacy” Linux. I originally compiled this for a user on Mandriva 2006 (see previous post about VMWare), but it works fine for other old Linux distros, too.
- Run:
$ tar zxvf mongodb-linux-i686-old-linux-1.tgz
- Make a directory for the database to put files in:
$ mkdir /home/user/data
- Upload libjava.so, libjvm.so, and libverify.so. Make sure they have execute permissions and put them somewhere like /home/user/lib.
- Run:
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/user/lib
replacing the path wherever you put the .so’s above.
- Start the database:
$ cd mongodb-linux-i686-old-linux-1 $ bin/mongod --dbpath /home/user/data --nojni run
I cheated a bit and didn’t install Java, so I had to use the –nojni option. If you install Java, you won’t need that (and you won’t need to upload the individual .so files).
Now, what good is a database if you can’t use it, right? So, I downloaded my PHP driver (go to its Github repository and click “Download” for the latest version). I then followed the install instructions and put the .so generated by make in /home/user/extensions.
I changed the options under “PHP Config” in Hostmonster’s CPanel to use php.ini in /home/user/public_html/php.ini, and then edited that file to use my extension.
I made a simple test page with:
Which connected me to MongoDB, showing:
localhost:27017
when I loaded the page!
Kristina Chodorow's Blog 
Hi Kristina,
when installing the PHP Driver as by the given “install instructions”
http://www.php.net/manual/en/mongo.installation.php
did you follow the manual installation or use the “pecl install mongo” command?
With the manual installation I get the following error:
Installing shared extensions: /usr/lib64/php/modules/
cp: cannot create regular file `/usr/lib64/php/modules/#INST@18179#’: Read-only file system
With the “pecl” command, this error:
checking whether the C compiler works… configure: error: cannot run C compiled programs.
Greetings,
Nikolay
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These instructions are incredibly out-of-date (this was written over a year ago). I’ll add a warning at the top of the post.
You can’t use PECL (as far as I know) on Hostmonster. I downloaded the driver’s source, compiled it, DID NOT install it, and then modified php.ini to set extension_dir to the local directory mongo.so ended up in.
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I actually followed these instructions for the mongo installation:
http://rcrisman.net/article/11/installing-mongodb-on-hostmonster-bluehost-accounts
For the PHP Driver, okay, it may work, but I have the problem that I am on Shared hosting, and can not leave the “mongod” server running all the time. Also from Hostmonster told me that they do not plan to support NoSQL databases, so I left this as an option with them.
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Yeah, I ran into the same problem with them killing MongoDB after 5 minutes. You can get a dedicated IP and they’ll let it run, but that’s not a workable solution for me (I’m cheap). Hostmonster seems like a pretty hidebound company.
Edit: if enough people bug them, though, maybe they’ll start supporting stuff like Mongo, so thanks!
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