Bottle + MongoDB Example

A didactic Web application written in Python to illustrate how to use the Bottle web-framework with the MongoDB database.

It’s a port I made of Mike Dirolf’s DjanMon application (how to use Django with MongoDB).

Bottle is a wonderful micro web-framework, it’s beautifully written and documented and has that ``just right'' feel about it. Bottle has support for multiple webservers and template engines — I’m really enjoying it after working with Django.

MongoDB is a schemaless document-oriented database designed for the Web. For me, working with MongoDB has been a revelation. Database creation, administration and migration (long the bane of database developers) is trivial in comparison with traditional SQL databases. Document storage management is baked into MongoDB and is used in many web applications (document storage has always been awkward and slow with relational databases).

This document is also published as a blogpost.

Here’s a screenshot.

To run the application install the prerequisite packages then:

git clone https://github.com/srackham/bottle-mongodb-example.git
cd bottle-mongodb-example
python bottle-mongodb-example.py

The application creates and displays a paged list of user created messages which are stored in a MongoDB database along with uploaded images (no file system management required it’s all in the database) — not bad for 93 lines of Python code and a 79 line HTML template. The really neat thing is that you don’t have to create the database, tables or schema — it all happens automatically.

Prerequisites

• Python.

• MongoDB (see the MongoDB website for install instructions).

• PyMongo, the Python MongoDB driver:

  sudo easy_install pymongo

• The Bottle web-framework:

  git clone https://github.com/defnull/bottle.git
  cd bottle
  python setup.py install

I’m running in this environment — it works for me but your mileage may vary:

• Xubuntu 10.04

• Bottle 0.9dev

• Python 2.6.5

• MongoDB 1.6.5

• PyMongo 1.9