Mongoose autoReconnect option

I'm trying to set up the MongoDB auto reconnection feature via Mongoose. Every way that I have tried to pass the option has had no effect, or at least the reconnected event isn't being emitted.

What I've tried:

mongoose.createConnection("mongodb://localhost:27017/test", { auto_reconnect: true });
mongoose.createConnection("mongodb://localhost:27017/test", { autoReconnect: true });
mongoose.createConnection("mongodb://localhost:27017/test", { server: { auto_reconnect: true } });
mongoose.createConnection("mongodb://localhost:27017/test", { server: { autoReconnect: true } });

If one of these is correct, the reconnected event should be triggered and a message should be logged in the console, however this never happens.

If there is a delay before the reconnection, does anyone know how to configure it?

Thanks in advance

For anyone looking into this, take a look at this and this issue in mongoose repository.

I had the same question as you, and robertklep's solution didn't work for me either. I found when MongoDB service is stopped, an error event is triggered, but the connection.readyState is still 1 (connected). That may be why it didn't auto reconnect.

This is what I have now:

  var db = mongoose.connection;

  db.on('connecting', function() {
    console.log('connecting to MongoDB...');
  });

  db.on('error', function(error) {
    console.error('Error in MongoDb connection: ' + error);
    mongoose.disconnect();
  });
  db.on('connected', function() {
    console.log('MongoDB connected!');
  });
  db.once('open', function() {
    console.log('MongoDB connection opened!');
  });
  db.on('reconnected', function () {
    console.log('MongoDB reconnected!');
  });
  db.on('disconnected', function() {
    console.log('MongoDB disconnected!');
    mongoose.connect(dbURI, {server:{auto_reconnect:true}});
  });
  mongoose.connect(dbURI, {server:{auto_reconnect:true}});

Plucked from http://bites.goodeggs.com/posts/reconnecting-to-mongodb-when-mongoose-connect-fails-at-startup/

This worked for me:

var mongoose = require('mongoose')
var mongoUrl = "mongodb://localhost:27017/test"

var connectWithRetry = function() {
  return mongoose.connect(mongoUrl, function(err) {
    if (err) {
      console.error('Failed to connect to mongo on startup - retrying in 5 sec', err);
      setTimeout(connectWithRetry, 5000);
    }
  });
};
connectWithRetry();

Recently, I investigate the auto-reconnect with MongoDB var Mongoose. There is one issue here, when invoking mongoose.connect within disconnected event handler, it will trigger infinite loop. Why the SIGINT signal is blocked when mongoose auto reconnect.

One work around solution could be that the mongoose.connect() only be called when there is no connection with MongoDB before. The auto_reconnect flag could make mongoose reconnect with MongoDB automatically. Here are code snippets.

var mongoose = require('mongoose');

var isConnectedBefore = false;
var connect = function() {
    mongoose.connect('mongodb://localhost/' + + 'test_dev', {server: { auto_reconnect: true }});
};
connect();

mongoose.connection.on('error', function() {
    console.log('Could not connect to MongoDB');
});

mongoose.connection.on('disconnected', function(){
    console.log('Lost MongoDB connection...');
    if (!isConnectedBefore)
        connect();
});
mongoose.connection.on('connected', function() {
    isConnectedBefore = true;
    console.log('Connection established to MongoDB');
});

mongoose.connection.on('reconnected', function() {
    console.log('Reconnected to MongoDB');
});

// Close the Mongoose connection, when receiving SIGINT
process.on('SIGINT', function() {
    mongoose.connection.close(function () {
        console.log('Force to close the MongoDB conection');
        process.exit(0);
    });
});

Just for the sake of posterity, as most of these answers are old, you should not need to deal with this issue any more, as it is now baked into the nodejs mongodb driver. To quote kdmon:

...reconnecting is now baked into mongoose and enabled by default. But it might be useful to know that Mongoose by default will only try reconnecting for 30s and then give up. Set the server.reconnectTries option to increase the number of times mongoose will try to reconnect. For example, you can tell mongoose to never stop trying to reconnect like this:

mongoose.connect(uri, { server: { reconnectTries: Number.MAX_VALUE } });

See connection docs and server options defaults for details

@Clive's answer was excellent. Nonetheless, due to using mongoose with Promise I was getting the following warning after every failed attempt:

(node:18123) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection (rejection id: 1): MongoError: failed to connect to server [localhost:27017] on first connect

ES6 version (with Promise)

I also added a small timeout between reconnects in this version (completely optional), to prevent your screen (or your logger) being flooded of repeated messages.

import mongoose from 'mongoose';

mongoose.Promise = Promise; // Set mongoose to use ES6 Promises.

const dbURI = 'mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/myDb';
const reconnectTimeout = 5000; // ms.

function connect() {
  mongoose.connect(dbURI, { auto_reconnect: true })
    .catch(() => {}); // Catch the warning, no further treatment is required
                      // because the Connection events are already doing this
                      // for us.
}

const db = mongoose.connection;

db.on('connecting', () => {
  console.info('Connecting to MongoDB...');
});

db.on('error', (error) => {
  console.error(`MongoDB connection error: ${error}`);
  mongoose.disconnect();
});

db.on('connected', () => {
  console.info('Connected to MongoDB!');
});

db.once('open', () => {
  console.info('MongoDB connection opened!');
});

db.on('reconnected', () => {
  console.info('MongoDB reconnected!');
});

db.on('disconnected', () => {
  console.error(`MongoDB disconnected! Reconnecting in ${reconnectTimeout / 1000}s...`);
  setTimeout(() => connect(), reconnectTimeout);
});

connect();

Further information on Connection events.