Connect Streamlit to MongoDB
Introduction
This guide explains how to securely access a MongoDB database from Streamlit Cloud. It uses the PyMongo library and Streamlit's secrets management.
Create a MongoDB Database
Note
If you already have a database that you want to use, feel free to skip to the next step.
First, follow the official tutorials to install MongoDB, set up authentication (note down the username and password!), and connect to the MongoDB instance. Once you are connected, open the mongo
shell and enter the following two commands to create a collection with some example values:
use mydb
db.mycollection.insertMany([{"name" : "Mary", "pet": "dog"}, {"name" : "John", "pet": "cat"}, {"name" : "Robert", "pet": "bird"}])
Add username and password to your local app secrets
Your local Streamlit app will read secrets from a file .streamlit/secrets.toml
in your app's root directory. Create this file if it doesn't exist yet and add the database information as shown below:
# .streamlit/secrets.toml
[mongo]
host = "localhost"
port = 27017
username = "xxx"
password = "xxx"
Important
Add this file to .gitignore
and don't commit it to your Github repo!
Copy your app secrets to the cloud
As the secrets.toml
file above is not committed to Github, you need to pass its content to your deployed app (on Streamlit Cloud) separately. Go to the app dashboard and in the app's dropdown menu, click on Edit Secrets. Copy the content of secrets.toml
into the text area. More information is available at Secrets Management.
Add PyMongo to your requirements file
Add the PyMongo package to your requirements.txt
file, preferably pinning its version (replace x.x.x
with the version you want installed):
# requirements.txt
pymongo==x.x.x
Write your Streamlit app
Copy the code below to your Streamlit app and run it. Make sure to adapt the name of your database and collection.
# streamlit_app.py
import streamlit as st
import pymongo
# Initialize connection.
client = pymongo.MongoClient(**st.secrets["mongo"])
# Pull data from the collection.
# Uses st.cache to only rerun when the query changes or after 10 min.
@st.cache(ttl=600)
def get_data():
db = client.mydb
items = db.mycollection.find()
items = list(items) # make hashable for st.cache
return items
items = get_data()
# Print results.
for item in items:
st.write(f"{item['name']} has a :{item['pet']}:")
See st.cache
above? Without it, Streamlit would run the query every time the app reruns (e.g. on a widget interaction). With st.cache
, it only runs when the query changes or after 10 minutes (that's what ttl
is for). Watch out: If your database updates more frequently, you should adapt ttl
or remove caching so viewers always see the latest data. Read more about caching here.
If everything worked out (and you used the example data we created above), your app should look like this: