Connect to a cluster
Create your first connection from a URI or from individual fields, and turn on write protection before you point it at production.
A connection profile is saved, named and colour-coded. You can have as many as you like on Pro, and up to 8 on the free tier.
From a connection string
Paste a mongodb:// or mongodb+srv:// URI into the connection dialog. Monghoul fills in the host,
port, credentials, authentication mode, TLS, replica set and read preference from it, so an Atlas
string usually needs nothing else.
If you want to see what a URI actually says before you paste it anywhere, the connection string parser runs in your browser and never sends it anywhere.
From individual fields
Switch to individual-fields mode when you need something the URI does not carry cleanly: an X.509 certificate file, a Kerberos service name, or an SSH tunnel.
The eight authentication modes are listed on Connections and security. Four of them are Pro: X.509, LDAP, Kerberos and AWS IAM.
Turn on write protection first
Do this before you connect to anything that matters.
Write protection is per connection, and it can be narrowed to specific databases and collections. It covers inserts, updates, deletes, bulk writes, drops, renames, index changes and aggregation stages that write. A protected operation asks for explicit confirmation at every entry point, including the keyboard and the aggregation builder’s own stage preview.
The important part is where it is enforced. The confirmation is raised by reading your query, but the block itself happens at the driver, so a destructive call that the text could not reveal is still refused when it runs.
Write protection explains what that means in practice.
Test before you save
Monghoul tests connectivity and credentials before a new profile saves, and any profile can be re-tested later from its context menu. A connection that cannot be reached is reported as offline in the sidebar rather than failing silently the first time you run a query.
Give it a colour
Connection colours propagate to the tab strip and the sidebar. On a machine with production and staging open at once this is the cheapest safety feature in the app, so it is worth the ten seconds.