Change Your Password and Custom Data

Overview

Users with appropriate privileges can change their own passwords and custom data. Custom data stores optional user information.

Considerations

To generate a strong password for use in this procedure, you can use the openssl utility’s rand command. For example, issue openssl rand with the following options to create a base64-encoded string of 48 pseudo-random bytes:

openssl rand -base64 48

Prerequisites

To modify your own password and custom data, you must have privileges that grant changeOwnPassword and changeOwnCustomData actions respectively on the user’s database.

1

Connect as a user with privileges to manage users and roles.

Connect to the mongod or mongos with privileges to manage users and roles, such as a user with userAdminAnyDatabase role. The following procedure uses the myUserAdmin created in Enable Auth.

mongo --port 27017 -u myUserAdmin -p 'abc123' --authenticationDatabase 'admin'
2

Create a role with appropriate privileges.

In the admin database, create a new role with changeOwnPassword and changeOwnCustomData.

use admin
db.createRole(
   { role: "changeOwnPasswordCustomDataRole",
     privileges: [
        {
          resource: { db: "", collection: ""},
          actions: [ "changeOwnPassword", "changeOwnCustomData" ]
        }
     ],
     roles: []
   }
)
3

Add a user with this role.

In the test database, create a new user with the created "changeOwnPasswordCustomDataRole" role. For example, the following operation creates a user with both the built-in role readWrite and the user-created "changeOwnPasswordCustomDataRole".

use test
db.createUser(
   {
     user:"user123",
     pwd:"12345678",
     roles:[ "readWrite", { role:"changeOwnPasswordCustomDataRole", db:"admin" } ]
   }
)

To grant an existing user the new role, use db.grantRolesToUser().

Procedure

1

Connect with the appropriate privileges.

Connect to the mongod or mongos as a user with appropriate privileges.

For example, the following operation connects to MongoDB as user123 created in the Prerequisites section.

mongo --port 27017 -u user123 -p '12345678' --authenticationDatabase 'test'

To check that you have the privileges specified in the Prerequisites section as well as to see user information, use the usersInfo command with the showPrivileges option.

2

Change your password and custom data.

Use the db.updateUser() method to update the password and custom data.

For example, the following operation changes the user’s password to KNlZmiaNUp0B and custom data to { title: "Senior Manager" }:

use test
db.updateUser(
   "user123",
   {
      pwd: "KNlZmiaNUp0B",
      customData: { title: "Senior Manager" }
   }
)