Powershell + Mongo?

Often one of the things I hear when people recommend you stuff for windows development is to switch to git-bash as a default terminal. While I do install git on my machines, I have always wonder why do you need git-bash as default at all? you have Powershell after all!

Powershell comes with a bunch of common bash aliases like ls, cd, cat, etc, you can find most common aliases with Get-Alias (or get-alias), I can see right of the bat wget, tee and some others. Plus Powershell Core is Cross Platform!

Sometimes I need to do some manual backups on mongo databases while I know there are thousands of solutions to this already available but one of the ways to learn is to reinvent the wheel for n-th time so I decided to see if there was some way to talk to mongo from powershell and found this project

{% github nightroman/Mdbc %}

and Decided to give it a go, so I installed the vscode extension for Powershell plus the module in my local modules

Install-Module Mdbc -Scope CurrentUser

after that just created a test.ps1 file

Import-Module Mdbc;

function New-MongoExport {
  param (
    # Your Server's URL
    [string]
    $Url = "mongodb://localhost:27017",
    # Database to connect to
    [string]
    $Db = "test",
    # Collection Name
    [string] 
    $CollectionName = "users",
    # Where do we want to put that information
    [string] 
    $Path = ".\$collectionName.json",
    # Default Limit
    [int16] 
    $Limit = 10
  )
  # Remove the file if it exists
  Remove-Item $Path -ErrorAction Continue;
  # Connect and count
  Connect-Mdbc $Url $Db $CollectionName;
  $count = Get-MdbcData -Count;
  # Do some fancy output
  Write-Host "Exporting $($count) records" -ForegroundColor Yellow -BackgroundColor DarkCyan;
  for ($i = 0; $i -lt $count; $i += $Limit) {
    # You don't actually need to paginate
    # The module uses the mongo driver so it's quite fast
    # But anyways it reads like `Skip $i items and take the first $Limit items then, export those`
    Get-MdbcData -Skip $i -First $Limit | Export-MdbcData $Path -Append;
  }
  # We're Done, fancy output
  Write-Host "File Written: $Path" -ForegroundColor Black -BackgroundColor Green;
}

New-MongoExport
# Also you can use it like this
# New-MongoExport -Url mongodb://myotherserver:1234 -Db NotTestDB -CollectionName posts

I think the module actually has a way to export collections directly, but like I said above I just wanted to toy out with this.

I don't know, but this appealed to me makes me wonder what I could do with it, besides automation, you know this language is supposed to be used to automate stuff also anyways

Have you done something in Powershell? share it in the comments! Also if you don't like Powershell could you share why? I mean I guess there's a reason why WSL is a thing nowdays.