Before we officially implement MongoDB into our actual application, let's first take a look at some basic examples of connecting to a MongoDB server from within Node.js.

Create a new project folder to store some sample code to experiment with. I'll call my folder mongotest. Inside this folder, create a new file called test.js and in this file we will play around with some code to test how to connect to MongoDB and how to insert and retrieve some data. The first thing we need to do in order to connect to a MongoDB server from node is to require a mongodb module.

To get started, change directories into the new mongotest folder and install the mongodb module using npm:

$ cd mongotest
$ npm install mongodb